That's why at current we have 1.3 million people dying on the road in the US alone. It might make the matter of transitioning to self-driving worse, but it also makes manual driving worse.
The WSJ article includes NHTSA data indicating 'only' 35,000 traffic fatalities per yeah. Where are you getting this 1.3 million number from? That would be equivalent to a full 1% of US population dying on the road every 2.5 years
you're right. I googled for "number of car deaths in US" (or so I thought) and that number came up. 1.3M seems to be the number for world wide fatalities.