Interestingly, even if the number of fatal accidents caused by robot trucks was less than the number of accidents caused by human trucks, it would be unacceptable to the public.
The number of fatal accidents would have to go close to zero.
The number of fatal accidents would have to go close to zero.
And the robot truck companies would be insane not to protect themselves. They would be wise to take a page out of the commercial aircraft industry's playbook, and instrument the hell out of each vehicle. Continuous engine telemetry and redundant camera views of the immediate vicinity recorded on a 30-minute loop, frozen after a crash and a core dump of the "driver" appended to the record for crash reconstruction. It'll be a tough sell emotionally, that the robot truck was following the speed limit and stop lights, but we'll get there.
I think it's all a matter of degrees. If the "right" policy offends people's religious ideas, nationalism, instinctive irrationality's, or whatever else, this might have consequences that outweigh the benefits of this policy. People being irrational can do damage.
An obvious example is civil unrest which is often a good reason not to implement liberal/libertarian policies in many places.
It's only a good reason because there are other good reasons to implement those policies too. Civil unrest would not be a good reason to begin beheading petty criminals, no matter how scared people were of being pick-pocketed. I'll give it to you that it is a matter of degrees, but the amount of fear that would be required to outweigh even the smallest iota of real benefit would have to be enormous. If robot trucks saved just one life per year on average, it would be morally unacceptable to obstruct their implementation even if they induced the same amount of fear as all the fears of planes crashing and terrorist attacks.
There are lots of places where lives are lost because a certain narrative is something that the public can swallow. You could spend billions of virtually useless aviation security dollars to save many lives. How would the public react to 50 terrorism deaths, twice a decade?