I'm confident I'm a safer driver than at least 50% of the people on the roads - if I thought pilots were only as safe as an average driver I'd be worried.
Everybody may think they are "skilled", but any given person can in principle assess their own risk more accurately than assuming they are average. Don't confuse safety with nebulous ideas of skill or ability.
You can compare your insurance rate with the average, and you can consider objective factors that are really blatant such as whether you drive drunk, or when falling asleep, or while texting. And of course you can compare the number of accidents and tickets you have to average.
even if that were true (statistically it isn’t), unlike with a plane roads aren’t so tightly controlled and other drivers are barely competent. head-ons happen all too frequently and i’m sure one of the victims is ... a safe driver.
driving isn’t unsafe because of your own (self-assessed) skill, it’s unsafe because of that other 50%.
no matter how safe of a driver you are, you should be worried.
I'm aware that people over-estimate their skill, I'd have been inclined to say "in the top 20%" otherwise, lol. Whilst my reaction time has slowed slightly, and my focus deteriorated a little with age (IMO), I've been driving cars for 25 years without an at fault collision (taxi driver hit me when I braked hard to avoid killing a dog -- we were sub 30mph otherwise I'd have chosen to hit the dog). Have avoided some accidents for sure. I also hold a full motorbike license, have driven minibuses and car&trailer pairs. I'm aged enough to have calmed down and having ridden motorbikes feel I've much more road awareness than the average driver.
Also, I considered head-ons, etc., where the injured party is not at fault - but whilst they increase the risk an experienced and competent drive can avoid some collisions, mitigate the harm of others, and will nonetheless reduce their chances of being in a collision from their side. If 50% of injured parties are the cause, and I can reduce that 50% by 50% then I've still reduced my chance of being injured by 25%.
Does anyone think that doesn't put me in the bottom 50% for risk?
Still, the point stands that I expect aeroplanes to be better maintained and have more redundant and fail-safe systems than a car; and expect pilots to be better trained and more competent (prevented from driving drugged/drunk/tired more than truck/car drivers, etc.) than the average car driver. So, aeroplanes only having the same per-mile safety as cars is [would be] terrible.
skill != safety, because how much of a safety margin you leave generally swamps most of the effect of skill. And your safety margin reduces the effect of other drivers' stupidity.
And I hate it when people say "statistically that isn't true". How can a fact about an individual be statistically not true? Is it statistically true that I have 2.4 (or whatever) children, even if I have none?
