Waymos crash less than human drivers

The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.

In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.

Here, without any confidence intervals, we're told we've saved ~70 airbag incidents in 20 mil miles. A bad update to the fleet will easily eclipse that impact.

You would save more lives by outlawing motorcycles; however, it would just be the motorcyclists themselves.

Another thing people don't consider is that not all seats in a vehicle are equally safe. The drivers seat is the safest. Front passenger is less safe but still often twice as safe as sitting in the backseat. If you believe picking up your elderly parents and then escorting them in your backseat is safer than them driving alone you might be wrong. This is a fatality mode you easily recognize in the FARS data. Where do most people in a robotaxi sit?

Your biggest clear win would be building better pedestrian infrastructure and improving roadway lighting to reduce pedestrian deaths.