Self-driving cars still safer than what we had before

Tim Bajarin (Page 1A, March 20) is misguided in his conclusion that “selfdriving cars are still years away from being safe enough to use in real-world settings.”

Using his logic, we would still be driving horse-driven carriages, which are safety and environmental nightmares. We also wouldn’t have prescription drugs, nearly all of which have serious complications including death.

No transportation method is perfectly safe, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be safer than what we were doing before. In the United States alone, more than 16 pedestrians are killed by motor vehicles every day, which gives some perspective to this isolated event.

— Paul Mennen, Sunnyvale