> The deaths from self-driving accidents will look _strange_ and _inhuman_ to most people.

I like to quip that error-rate is not the same as error-shape. A lower rate isn't actually better if it means problems that "escape" our usual guardrails and backup plans and remedies.

You're right that some of it may just be a perception-issue, but IMO any "alien" pattern of failures indicates that there's a meta-problem we need to fix, either in the weird system or in the matrix of other systems around it. Predictability is a feature in and of itself.