Why would self driving cars be different?
Are they though? Statistically speaking, planes are safer than cars, and SDVs don't exactly have a pristine record track already.
I think there's an argument to be made that if flying cars were owned by a company like Uber, regularly inspected, and flown by a computer, the safety could be there, but then you're still left with issues such as noise and energy efficiency.
Flying cars were probably asking to operate in close proximity to things and people and it would make the probs a lot different IMO.
[0] end of hyperbole.
With that said, this is sort of the point: SDVs would be close to arms reach of pedestrians virtually all the time, so I'd imagine that when all is said and done, the safety/regulatory barrier ought to be an extremely high hurdle to overcome.
There are many things that we can talk about in terms of "if only X was solved, that would change the world" (e.g. X being the cure for cancer, or X being singularity, etc). But the devil is of course in the details: until we know what X is, it _could_ be a single breakthrough but it most likely is a nearly insurmountable wall of a million factors). For SDVs, X is L5 autonomy.
That said I'm far more about co-disrupting the world by .. walking.