It would be even more tragic if they went too quickly, there was some high-profile incident, and the backlash slowed rollout even more, resulting in even more lives lost in the long run.

Worth remembering that Uber had one fatality and it resulted in the dissolution of the entire project.

The stakes are very high and public tolerance for error is basically zero.

Uber had one fatality, yes, but the investigation into that fatality showed fundamental issues with their approach: https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash

If instead it had turned out that their system was well built but ran into a freak edge case, I doubt they would have shut down.

They weren't forced to dissolve the project. They gave up. Uber had already lost their founder at that point. The new management wasn't serious about self driving and they were likely already looking for an excuse to get rid of it. If Waymo had a single fatality today after years of safe operation and with determination to continue it would be a completely different story.

> It’s tragic that many lives will be lost due to the fear-driven slow rollout.

Sam Peltzman showed with statistics that the FDA's mandate of "safe and effective" slowed down the development of new pharmaceuticals past the point that there were more deaths.

He took it to Congress, who simply latched on to "safe and effective" as an obviously good idea, statistics be damned.

"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation", Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...