You nailed the source of my skepticism as well. I'm sure Waymo has a good self-driving system, but it operates in highly constrained environments. I'm very skeptical that if you controlled for all variables, that self-driving today would show a significant safety improvement. But so far, so good.

>- Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely

I would give credit to Waymo and Self-Driving systems for this. The promise of self-driving is that it won't do stupid things that humans may do that increase chance of accident.