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I was ready to go do the math and prove you wrong, but you're right! Some random infographic I found suggests that the mortality associated with driving of all

I was ready to go do the math and prove you wrong, but you're right! Some random infographic I found suggests that the mortality associated with driving of all road vehicles is about 1.14 Fatalities per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled. If we say that the average driver is mostly urban and mostly arterial driving, with a health amount on highway on a per hour basis that puts at us at about 1.14 fatalities per (100,000,000 * 1 hour / 45 miles ) 2 million hours. I tried to find other routine activities with any element of risk that were safer than that and had trouble doing so.

bombcar 4y ago
Airline travel is safer - but the amount of "safety stuff" done there is much more extreme, considering how there's little vehicle training, not much maintenance, and driving continues at all times and in all weather. This isn't to say we shouldn't try to make it safer, but that we should correctly understand where the risks are.
syntheweave 4y ago
Fatalities/VMT isn't the right stat to use to evaluate safety because injuries and deaths cluster around conflict points(intersections, crossovers to oncoming lane, offramp exits, etc.). It can be simultaneously true that most of the miles driven are safe, but also that there are danger zones which some road users are repeatedly subjected to. And when we talk about AVs being safe, we aren't saying "they'll be safer at avoiding a crash when racing", a situation where one might credibly consider using VMT. It's relatively mundane situations of making a clean left turn, stopping at stop signs, decelerating when exiting the freeway, and so forth. Those are things you encounter with higher frequency when you are making relatively shorter trips.