The interesting thing is that Maryland drivers are among the worst I've seen over a wider spectrum of factors. Sober California drivers seem pretty safe. Virginia drivers are miserable on interstates because they pass one another at 1-3mph differentials (I assume this is a response to the reputed harsh soeeding enforcement there) and are victims of often-wrong signage, but are otherwise uninteresting. South Carolina drivers cause dangerous situations by trying to give away their right of way. Maryland drivers aggressively fight back agaibst merges, change lanes erratically, and crash in a quarter inch of snow at shocking rates, despite the fact that their salt trucks have higher mass-flow-rates than their snow storms. The only drivers who stand out vs Maryland are in big military areas where there's a significant minority of people driving 20mph faster than traffic and merging erratically while doing so.

When I got my license I was advised to do it in nearby Kentucky, since they didnt have a driving portion of the test at all, all you had to do was a written quiz

That doesn't mean much because most states, including Texas, also have full reciprocity with Germany. There doesn't really seem to be any rhyme or reason to what states they deem "equivalent".

I don't think any US state requires you to take several full-day courses after getting your license, for snow and ice handling, as is required in Switzerland for example. Also the road tests I've seen are a joke compared to both the Swiss and South African tests, both of which I've gone through. Requirements to check your mirrors every 10 seconds. Check your blind spot before indicating, then again, before merging. Reverse alley docking and parallel parking in tight spaces. Emergency braking from a fixed speed within a certain distance.

Of course, after years of practice this is how you should be driving. But almost nobody who doesn't explicitly practice for the test can actually pass.

Whether a license is accepted reciprocally is more a political decision than based on test stringency.

It's difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison with this statistic because the US has more sprawl.

Like sure, per-kilometre fatalities may be down, but that says nothing of:

1. The number of non-fatal crashes

2. How much of this incorporates driving on large highways

3. When not on a highway, the degree of traffic in which fatal crashes can't occur (can't get in a high-speed accident in high traffic in New York, for example)

Needless to say, the roads of Japan and New Zealand are so different from the US that it isn't exactly clear that this statistic is really informing us of much, really.