The whole concept of ”bad things happen to good people for no reason” is extremely hard to bear. Somehow this reminds me of people who believe the right diet will protect them from cancer, the right prenatal care from birth defects, etc.
Look, let's say a Tesla, oh, just as a random example, careens directly into a clearly visible truck because its cameras can't distinguish white trucks from bright sunny skies, killing "my daughter Susie." In this hypothetical, this is a truly autonomous Tesla, and overall, these truly autonomous Teslas are less crash-prone than the human average.
As Susie's dad, my argument is that this accident was caused by Tesla. Yes, Tesla may have also saved some other people, under different circumstances, circumstances which are harder for humans to deal with and easier for cars to deal with. So what? That doesn't change the fact that Susie was killed by their product misbehaving in a way that a basically competent human driver wouldn't have. It's not like Tesla previously saved Susie's life, and at least she got to live longer than she would have in the counterfactual -- it's not like all the Susies out there in the world are all essentially doomed to die in auto accidents today.
If Susie went to a doctor with a mild infection and he gave her an inappropriate drug and it killed her, you had better believe that I would sue the shit out of him and also want him prosecuted, even if in the year before that he saved 37 other kids' lives from other illnesses.
Lives saved is effectively transparent. If you are only acknowledged for negative outcomes then you’re incentivised to not play the game.
It's the same mentality that means we have root cause analysis for plane and train crashes but for a car crash, SOP is pretty much to blame 1) whoever died or 2) noone at all, and 3) never the infrastructure.
When a car crashes, we just scrape up the debris and move on, after usually assigning blame to one of the drivers who ends up with higher insurance premiums or a lawsuit, assuming they survived. There's little effort to learn from the crashes.
It's the same thing that powers fears over mass shootings even though, statistically, they are a tiny fraction of overall gun violence. Most of the rest, however, can be avoided by keeping yourself out of bad situations with gangs or drugs...so even though the stats are higher people feel more in control...vs just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So if "bad things happen to good people for no reason" is unpalatable and it's the narrative for mass transit, and "bad things happen to drivers for reasons in their control" is the easy narrative for cars, I'd say "bad things happen to good people for reasons that are in our control but we still do nothing" is closer to the true narrative for cars, but it is also unpalatable. There is an element of this in many risk-related scenarios, but it is especially clear here.