I think situations where one has to choose between someone outside the vehicle and its occupants are not very common. They do happen. In fact, I know someone

I think situations where one has to choose between someone outside the vehicle and its occupants are not very common. They do happen. In fact, I know someone who almost had to make such a choice. It was in France (he's French). He was doing somewhere around 140km/h (call it 90mph) on a rural limited-access road, and came around a curve to find a car stopped in the left lane of a two-lane roadway -- apparently on account of a flat tire. One of the occupants was out of the car and walking toward the right lane, as if about to cross to the right shoulder. The timing was such that my friend was able to pass by in the right lane before the pedestrian got there, but had he been two seconds later, as my friend said to me, "I would have had to hit him". All that said -- it was 20 years ago that I heard this, and I don't recall hearing any similar tales since. This one obviously stuck in my head, so I think I would recall. I've certainly never been in such a situation myself. So the argument that self-driving cars will reduce fatalities so substantially that we don't need to worry too much about these edge cases makes a lot of sense to me.