> Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years.
That's not telling you what you think it is. A lot of those deaths are that person in a car on their own. Usually involving drugs or alcohol. It intentionally folds in "deaths caused by others" and "death caused by self" into the same category. It's not an appropriate statistic to base policy on.
> If you prevent a road accident fatality, chances are that person will go on to live many more healthy years/decades.
Chances are that person is going to kill themselves in a vehicle again later as you have failed to examine MODE of accident. Your analysis is entirely wrong.
> That's not telling you what you think it is. A lot of those deaths are that person in a car on their own. [...]
Sure - going off of NHTSA figures it looks around 35%. There's also a lot of car passenger deaths (~15%), pedestrian deaths (~20%), and deaths of car drivers with passengers (~15%).
Not entirely sure the point of breaking it out like this, though. These are all still deaths that self-driving cars could in theory prevent, and so all seem appropriate to consider and base policy on.
> Chances are that person is going to kill themselves in a vehicle again later [...]
Unsafe drivers (under the influence, distracted, etc.) are disproportionately represented in fatalities, but that neither means most road accident fatalities are unsafe drivers nor that most unsafe drivers will have a fatal car crash. As far as I can tell, even a driver using amphetamines (increasing risk of a fatal crash 5X) still isn't more likely than not to die in a car crash (a very high bar).
Further, if the way the initial fatal crash was prevented was by prevalence of safe autonomous vehicles, the future crashes would also be similarly mitigated.
That's not telling you what you think it is. A lot of those deaths are that person in a car on their own. Usually involving drugs or alcohol. It intentionally folds in "deaths caused by others" and "death caused by self" into the same category. It's not an appropriate statistic to base policy on.
> If you prevent a road accident fatality, chances are that person will go on to live many more healthy years/decades.
Chances are that person is going to kill themselves in a vehicle again later as you have failed to examine MODE of accident. Your analysis is entirely wrong.