To be clear, I'm not arguing for what it should be. I'm arguing for what it is.
I tend to drive the speed limit. I think more people should. I also recognise there is no public support for ticketing folks going 5 over.
> my choice to use a self-driving car has to assess its risk compared to my driving, not the drunk's
All of these services are supply constrained. That's why I've revised my hypothesis. There are enough folks who will take that car before you get comfortable who will make it lucrative to fill streets with them.
(And to be clear, I'll ride in a Waymo or a Cybercab. I won't book a ride with a friend or my pets in the latter.)
It seems reasonable that the deaths and major injuries come highly disproportionally from excessively high speed, slow reaction times at such speeds, going much too fast for conditions even at lower absolute speeds. What if even the not very good self-driving cars are much better at avoiding the base conditions that result in accidents leading to deaths, even if they aren't so good at avoiding lower-speed fender-benders?
If that were true, what would that mean to our adoption of them? Maybe even the less-great ones are better overall. Especially if the cars are owned by the company, so the costs of any such minor fender-benders are all on them.
If that's the case, maybe Tesla's camera-only system is fairly good actually, especially if it saves enough money to make them more widespread. Or maybe Waymo will get the costs of their more advanced sensors down faster and they'll end up more economical overall first. They certainly seem to be doing better at getting bigger faster in any case.