Remember that "cameras" aren't as good as human perception because human eyes interact with the environment instead of being passive sensors. (That is, if you can't see something you can move your head.)
Plus we have ears, are under a roof so can't get rained on, are self cleaning, temperature regulating, have much better dynamic range, wear driving glasses…
Which sounds like a lot until you realize 1) we drive over three trillion miles a year in the US, and 2) the majority of those accidents are concentrated to a fraction of all drivers. The median human driver is quite good, and the state of the art AI isn't even in the same galaxy yet.
I keep hearing this argument over and over, but I find it uncompelling. As a relatively young person with good vision, who has never been in an accident after many years of driving, and who doesn't make the kind of simple mistakes I've seen the absurd mistakes self-driving cars make and I would not trust my life to a self-driving car.
Asking people to accept a driverless car based on over-arching statistics is papering over some very glaring issues. For example, are most accidents in cars being caused by "average" drivers or are they young / old / intoxicated / distracted / bad vision? Are the statistics randomly distributed (e.g. any driver is just as likely as the next to get in accidents)? Because the driverless cars seem to have accidents at random in unpredictable ways, but human drivers can be excellent (no accidents, no tickets ever), or terrible (drive fast, tickets, high insurance, accidents, etc). The distribution of accidents among humans is not close to uniform, and is usually explainable. I wouldn't trust a poor human driver on a regular basis, nor would I trust an AI because I'm actually a much better driver than both (no tickets, no accidents, can handle complex situations the AI can't). Are the comparisons of human accidents being treated as homogenous (e.g. the chance of ramming full speed into a parked car the same as a fender-bender?). I see 5.8M car crashes anually, but deaths remain fairly low (~40k, .68%), vs 400 driverless accidents with ~20 deaths (5%), I'm not sure we're talking about the same type of accidents.
tl;dr papering over the complexity of driving and how good a portion of drivers might be by mixing non-homogenous groups of drivers and taking global statistics of all accidents and drivers to justify unreliable and relatively dangerous technology would be a strict downgrade for most good drivers (who are most of the population).
Plus we have ears, are under a roof so can't get rained on, are self cleaning, temperature regulating, have much better dynamic range, wear driving glasses…