> The vehicles seem to be incredibly safe when compared to human driven vehicles

Well, according to the article they are often human-driven.

Anyhow, Caltrans estimates 8.8 million miles traveled by vehicles in SF daily. That's 6.4 billion miles during the 2-year period that Cruise did less than 700,000 miles.

In California there's 1.38 deaths per 100,000,000 miles traveled. Cruise doing ~1% of the mileage in which one would expect a death to occur doesn't seem like enough of a sample to declare a comparative safety advantage.