Original horseless carriages didn't have any rules like that. We liked them anyway. That seems a more realistic model of adoption, than ivory tower perfect-safety pipe dreams.
The same timeframe does not necessarily apply to other kinds of systems. The study is about self-driving cars and the numbers quoted are about self-driving cars, in particular self-driving cars compared to human-driven cars.
The study starts by defining various industry-standard measures of reliability, for example scroll down to page 3 and look at equation 1 and equation 2. You can see that those are not about "perfect safety" but about measuring the probability of an accident and so on.
As a general rule, if you are confused by the text of a study, check out the maths. They should be unambiguous.
Edit: it took almost 4 decades to improve them. We are starting with driverless vehicles just right now.
Besides, i don't even see the value proposition for fsd other than commercial trucks maybe.
If people want to be driven around, maybe a taxi or public transport would be more economical and better for congestion and the environment in general. Not sure what people want to do while being driven in a fsd car. A human to human discussion is already possible. Watching a movie? Read a book? Sleep? All these are not practical in a driver's seat.
It's not about emotions; it's about statistics.
The problem that needs to be overcome is not the emotions of people losing loved ones, but the difficulty of accurately estimating safety by test-driving autonomous cars.
The following is from a Rand Corporation study titled: "Driving to Safety"; subtitle "How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?"
Key Findings
Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.
Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use.
Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety.
Developers of this technology and third-party testers will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability.
Even with these methods, it may not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles. Uncertainty will remain.
In parallel to developing new testing methods, it is imperative to develop adaptive regulations that are designed from the outset to evolve with the technology so that society can better harness the benefits and manage the risks of these rapidly evolving and potentially transformative technologies.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html
Bottom line, Tesla's (and everybody else's) "safety record" isn't and it will take a lot more time to know whether self-driving cars are as safe as human-driven cars. The stats you quote are not sufficiently informative.