Escalator accidents kill 17 Americans a year. So I wonder if the average American travelled as many miles per year on escalators as they do in cars if the death/injury rates would be higher or lower?
In short, accidents of all varieties are hard to classify. In this case, though you seem to vastly underestimate the numbers involved. According to latest reports [0], the Uber program is only driving about 20K miles a week. Further more, the rate of human-interventions is about once every MILE.
Normal human driving is bad, of course. But how many times in the last 1,000 miles you've driven have you needed your passenger to intervene to prevent an accident?
[0] http://www.recode.net/2017/3/16/14938116/uber-travis-kalanic...
In 2016, Waymo cars drove 636,000 miles with 124 disengagements [1].
Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile [2].
Uber is a menace.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...
[2] http://www.recode.net/2017/3/16/14938116/uber-travis-kalanic...
For example, I believe Waymo cars drive mostly on a fixed number of preplanned routes. You would expect limited disengagements over time, as it's got tons of data on those specific routes.
It's probably fair to say that, in the course of a day, many of us are in driving situations where we avoid potentially dangerous situations whether or not it might technically have been someone else's fault were there an accident. Most of us (hopefully) learn to drive defensively to minimize the likelihood of an accident, not to take whatever space on a road we have a "right" to.
> If I need to break traffic laws to avoid hitting another vehicle, or being struck, that's easy.
IMO based on anecdotes and observation, not enough people do that because of the "it's not my fault" attitude. The first consideration is fault, the second is safety.
But this is misleading because there are far more non-self-driving cars than self-driving cars.
There are 23 other companies with permits to test autonomous vehicles in CA and they're all doing pretty much the same thing. Waymo is way out in front, Cruise/GM is doing well, but there are maybe a half dozen large, deeply invested players (including Tesla) not nearly as advanced as Uber.
Many articles and press releases make it look like self-driving is "already here" when it's actually still very much a work in progress and not at all a solved problem
So why pretend like it's not important to cite how many people die today? We write laws and rules for how to operate vehicles that can be observed and operated by a computer. It's very likely that at a certain point those computers will exceed our aggregate ability to prevent deaths.
There are likely also wins we could get from the design of vehicles by not having to accommodate a human driver. Take for example the window that a person can be ejected from the vehicle through or debris can easily penetrate.
But then again, you're defending a clickbait headline about a robot getting into an accident that it may or may not be responsible for that didn't even result in someone being injured.