[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
It's not that we're bad at driving, I suppose, it's that we do an awful lot of it and it's quite a risky activity - especially if you're not 100% engaged.
That being said, if the US cared about road safety, there's quite a lot they could do to improve it already. Many techniques have been used successfully in other countries to significantly reduce road deaths, for example, a nationwide vehicle safety inspection standard and lowering speeds on urban roads.
The fact that these aren't being done leads me to think the concerns about road safety are actually rather irrelevant for the country as a whole. When self driving cars exist and are convenient, people probably will switch to them, as long as the accident rate is vaguely comparable.
All vehicle-related deaths in the US average around 32,000 annually, of which about 50% of those are alcohol and/or drug related, leaving the true accidental vehicular death number around 15,000 annually.
The problem we're trying to solve with FSD just doesn't exist at the levels FSD proponents would have you believe. Humans are incredibly safe drivers when you account for the number of people driving, and the number of miles driven per year.
Criticize human driving all you want, but even the worst of us can typically manage to get from point a to point b... Somehow.
I mean, that industrial agriculture eventually results in food on tables across the globe. So many systems at work. Run by the same people using their smart phones in their cars, haha. We manage to collectively make things happen.
Easy to criticize, but hard to argue against the results?
A million miles sounds like a lot, but it isn't. The average American drives 12,000 miles annually. Assuming a driving career of 52 years (from age 18 to 70), the average American will drive 624k miles. So the lifetime chances of getting into a serious accident are not exactly small.
(I don't know how to calculate the probability here, actually. Is 624k/1M the lifetime probability of getting into a serious accident?)
624k/1M is the expected number of serious accidents.
The probability of getting into at least one serious accident is 1 - (999999/1000000)^624000 = 46% (Every mile, you have a 99,9999% chance of no serious accident. You want that 624k times in a row).