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In life, the things that you don't know about are the ones that get you.
When you are traveling at speed in a vehicle weighing thousands of pounds, the things that you don't see are the ones that can kill you. I don't think its controversial to assert that most deadly accidents were caused by factors unknown to the driver.
When you are discussing activities that can end with you getting killed, you don't get a second chance, so it makes sense to eliminate every risk that you can, especially the ones that are easy to eliminate.
Why would I put my life in the hands of a factor that I cannot control nor see, especially when it is known that companies including Tesla and Uber have proven that they are perfectly willing to test unknown risks in their software on unsuspecting humans - thereby resulting in death: Ramming into a big rig in the former case (which was not recognized by the software) and ramming into a pedestrian in the latter (which was recognized in plenty of time to react but then judged by the software as an object that the car did not need to avoid).
In other words, those making the executive decisions at those companies decided that their pursuit was a higher priority than a certain amount of deaths. If you all want to be a party to that because "it hasn't happened enough for me to worry about it" be my guest. I'd rather put my life into my own hands every time because I can see and control all the factors.
You might argue "but there will be less deaths overall", let's just assume for sake of argument that is true, the problem is that doesn't map one bit to the individual. Would you sacrifice your life if you were guaranteed that in trade 2000 other lives would be saved? Let's even discount the fact that they are being saved from their own otherwise life-ending bad decisions. I would not take that trade and I suspect virtually no one else would.
Trading a few deaths to save many more is an insane game especially when it was completely unnecessary. It was done because they believed they could get away with skipping testing in a safe environment even if they killed a few people, and they were right.
They could have made the choice to develop the car's automation to emphasize safety over everything else, they could have made it slow down when confidence is low, they could have tested in environments that do not risk life, but they decided their rapid success was far more important. Think about that.
For their part Google seems to be far more careful in their testing and far less reckless from what I have heard.
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