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The study controls mileage (driving exposure) and zip-code (geographic region) but it does not specifically mention controlling for variables like efficiency or road use. So you're right, the vehicles could be moving more slowly or cautiously.

I do wonder whether a world of autonomous vehicles moving more slowly but safely is still a better world than ours — is there reason to the current speed/safety trade-off is optimal?

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Faster is cheaper, in terms of how much road we need.

Road-hours are absolutely fixed, for a given set of roads - 24 hours in a day times physical road miles divided by car spacing is a hard limit.

Slow cars are on the road longer.

Ideally all the cars would go the speed of light and use the roads for milliseconds per trip.

Surely we're not optimal now - speed is set by arbitrary limit signs placed largely politically. Then people go whatever speed they feel is right anyway.

Just saying, the measure of autodriving is a larger space than accident-rate.

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