That number alone proves nothing. You could try to say that "even if a self-driving car is a thousand times safer than the average human, that still leaves 32

That number alone proves nothing. You could try to say that "even if a self-driving car is a thousand times safer than the average human, that still leaves 32 deaths per year". But I don't buy that logic. You need a breakdown by cause. For instance: how many of those involved at least one person being drunk? Sleepy? Going above the speed limit? There are large classes of failure modes that self-driving cars are not prone to. Is it really too much to believe that some day we will have a civilization that can move people from place to place without killing anyone? I remain optimistic. But even if not, we can at least get this thing off the list of top k causes of death, for some integer k. Already it's responsible for less than two percent of US deaths. (source: wolfram alpha) A bit more work and we can move it onto lists like this instead: https://xkcd.com/369/ https://xkcd.com/369/