> after more than a century of safety improvements, tens of thousands of people die per year from electrocution, to say nothing of electrical fires
What was the lethality of gas lighting in terms of intoxication or fires? How many people died per year per household served?
Similarly for cars themselves. You're speaking of machines which operate on the basis of hundreds of small explosions per second hopefully contained within a metal chassis under a hood to let a person drive tons of metal around which can trivially be weaponized to cause mass deaths, as has already happened multiple times in Europe. Even when not behaving maliciously, the number of deaths caused by crashes is in the millions per year. And again that's also after a century of safety improvements.
[1] - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2010/26(2)/oj/eng