According to a Rand corp. study I quote in another comment, it will take millions or billions of miles and decades or centuries before we can know self-driving cars are safe, simply from observation:

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.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

That's statistics, btw, not fear. Data, like you say, will "win" at some point but that will be far in the future. Until then we have a few thousand systems whose safety we can't measure but are available commercially (and sold under pretense of improving safety).

Note also that before Tesla started selling cars with "autopilot" there was no way to know how safe it would be, in advance. That is not the behaviour of a company that cares at all about safety, other than as a marketing term.