The average baseline involves a driver that is not paying attention or hasn't slept X% of the time. You cannot magically wave away all the bad days and pretend only the good humans are on the streets. The bad days happen, people die.
The autonomous vehicle only has to do better than that. That's the whole point.
Statistically no. But you need to convince people - that is the point.
We are not rational. We do not respond well to a car running straight into a barrier or stand-still vehicle at 100 km/h without even attempting to brake (such as the failure modes that Tesla has demonstrated) even if it does well most of the time and has better statistics than an average human.
And further, as noted in the thread, a good part of driving is assessing other vehicles and vehicles behaving oddly (even if it is objectively better in isolation) is really bad and will increase the risk of collisions.
I think google have experienced this, that people do not respond well do the driving technique of their car since it doesn't behave as a human - not that it does anything wrong.
Individuals may not act rationally but regulators and insurance companies with their birds-eye view will see the hard numbers and hopefully provide incentives aligned with the rational choice.
I didn't suggest that the technology should be rushed and I agree that a careful approach can save more lives. But what constitutes "careful" matters here. For example if a city chooses to offer robotaxi discounts to people with bad driving records (before some cutoff date to avoid perverse incentives) then even an average taxi fleet could be a net-benefit even though the taxis do not perform better than the general population. And that's just in terms of lives saved, not counting the other benefits of having cheap transportation.
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Obviously, not everyone can be above average. Exactly half of all drivers have to be in the bottom half when it comes to driving skills and safety.
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Maybe, but the bottom half is not necessary drivers worse than average.
I do not know how you would calculate "average". But there are people on the road that could pull down the average a lot. So that more than 50 percent are better than average.
In colloquial speech, most people don't differentiate between "mean" and "median". My guess is that, in that kind of survey, the participants read or say "average" and implicitly mean "median" – and exactly 50 percent of drivers are better than the median, by definition.
The problem with not differentiating clearly between mean and median, is that you look out at other drivers and calculate a mean, then you assume that the median is the same. With a sufficiently skewed distribution this will hugely inflate your numbers, even if you have a realistic perspective of your actual skill.
[1] citation needed.