Yes, self-driving systems will have fewer deaths/distance driven and therefore be statistically safer than human drivers. But human drivers make human errors,

Yes, self-driving systems will have fewer deaths/distance driven and therefore be statistically safer than human drivers. But human drivers make human errors, understandable, explainable, common errors that we are used to, and therefore we underestimate their severity. Self-driving cars will make space-alien machine-logic crazy weird and definitely not human errors, they will cause fatalities in situations where any reasonable human wouldn't, and that is much scarier than human errors, and therefore we overestimate their severity. And that makes self-driving a very, very hard sell, it's simply not enough to be statistically better on just the numbers, you have to be psychologically better, and that's a huge hurdle.