Death rate is calculated as deaths per billion miles driven, so I don't see how the respective populations matter here. One could make the argument that population density is important to consider, but in the US the less populated states have higher death rates IIRC.

Where are you getting those stats?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Denmark (like most countries) are definitely better at not getting killed on the road, but closer to a factor of two by miles driven and four per capita.

From here (and my number was indeed wrong, its 1/5, not 1/6): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

> I don't see how the respective populations matter here.

They don’t matter per se. It is just a stat I had in my head that I could provide without googling anything to show how different both countries are. There are so many factors to consider with regards to driving infrastructure and habits, even density is not enough.

I fully agree, it's really hard to compare things like these across national boundaries. The actual countries don't really matter for the point I tried to make anyway: There are large cross-country differences between countries right now, so it seems prudent to look into those if one wants to decrease traffic deaths.

Waiting for L5, even if it actually is achieved in the current AI cycle, will introduce a whole new class of problems once self driving cars become a meaningful share of traffic, e.g. coordination/cooperation between cars and so on.

No, it is a typical response of a guy who spent two years and countless nights studying econometrics and the issues of specification and identification. But thank you for wrongly assuming my nationality and disregarding my response based on that.