> It's your passengers and the people in the car you collide with that might die as well.

The people within automobiles are the people who I am least concerned about since they are encased by a machine that is engineered to ensure their safety. It's people outside of vehicles I'm most concerned about. Their only protection is their own wits.

> machine that is engineered to ensure their safety

They are engineered for safety but they are not bulletproof. People die in car accidents every day.

I’d prefer not to lose someone I love because the driver behind me didn’t see we had to slow down because they were typing into their Maps app or they needed to use touch screens to change their AC settings.

Your fear seems to be unfounded if we can extrapolate data for Turkey: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-drivers-pa...

15k drivers and passengers dead for 3k pedestrians; 1.3M injured drivers/passengers for 170k pedestrians.

The only figure that supports your fear is that out of all injuries, 1.8% pedestrians die, whereas it's "only" 1.2% for those "encased in a machine".

But absolute numbers tell a different, more important story: ratio of deaths is 1:5, and 1:7.5 for injuries (meaning, they much less likely to be in a traffic accident).