Comment Re:disingenuous (Score 2) 365
Indeed - it's the fallacy of not understanding the difference between absolute numbers and proportions, among other things.
Yes, the absolute number of deaths per year due to vehicle incidents is a Scary Number. However, it amounts to roughly two deaths per day, in each state. This is not a "high rate" even though it's a scary total number.
Humans really are bad at understanding risk, full stop.
This doesn't even get into the fact that car crashes are not "random" (even though they are statistical) - so in order to get rid of them all, you have to address every special cause. Getting rid of impaired driving is indeed a good goal - and that doesn't even require "self-driving."
Consider that a few years ago, the annual vehicle death rate was only about 30k/year, and it spiked up by 10k/year recently. What caused that? It wasn't the cars, the cars are safer than ever before - what changed is people's behavior.
The problem is, it's really difficult to get convince people (especially in the USA) to change their behavior for the sake of others; instead they would rather spend cumulatively tens of millions per life saved to require back-up cameras in cars. And that was only to reduce something like 200 accidents per year. Can you imagine the total cost to society to eliminate 2000? 20000? The amount of extra computation power, specialized tech, and manufacturing capability, tradeoffs in reliability and repairability, increased barriers to entry in the industry, to get these marginal gains is massive.
We have already eliminated 90-95% of the causes of fatal vehicle accidents. Getting rid of that last 5-10% is challenging and expensive.