I'd want to compare to our best drivers (e.g. ambulance drivers), not average drivers.
They should be compared to taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers that is what is being replaced by this and as such where the net harm increase or reduction will occur.
Average drivers sometimes end up in jail for their mistakes. If Waymo made those same mistakes, guess what will happen.
If you are wronged by a machine you are always going to be emotional about it, i.e having your email account unceremoniously terminated by Google without recourse by an essentially automated process.
The thing to solve for is the lack of recourse. Very very difficult in American society given how skewed the relationship is between corporations and people (or the government for that matter).
If instead when a Waymo demonstratively caused an accident the payout was 10-100x higher than if a human was involved I suspect many peoples qualms would go away.
While I think just the "knowledge" (assuming Americans would accept facts...) that the driver is X% better than the best drivers on the roads would provide little comfort to most.
I think in societies outside of America these may be more successful actually. i.e most parts of Asia.
When the AI is better than the best humans, that's when the best humans finally change career.
There's nothing that requires delaying until that point, the time in which courts order drunk drivers to only be allowed to own self-driving models.
Why? As long as it is better than the median driver the roads are safer.
The intent is to increase miles driven, and the drivers a commercial service can be expected to replace first are professionals, not "median drivers". In practice accident stats are also benchmarked against mean drivers in a world in which serious accidents disproportionately involve inadequate drivers (or conditions Waymo does not deploy in)
