[k_sh]

Airplane safety should be more strict than car safety, because the damage an airplane crash causes is a handful of orders of magnitude higher than a car accident...

[stefan_]

Yet deaths in the latter vastly outpace adverse events in the former. What is the criteria by which public safety should operate? Is it biggest explosion?

[1stcity3rdcoast]

Opportunity cost of safety improvements to vehicles. Airliners cost like $100 million each, so they can afford to perfect safety. You can’t get airliner-level safety in a vehicle that costs less than $50,000.

[Johnny555]

Maybe not airliner level of safety, but based on the top causes of car accidents, they could probably be reduced by an order of magnitude with relatively inexpensive improvements:

  1. better driver training
  2. breathalyzer ignition interlocks
  3. speed limiters (even more reduced speed at night/rain)
  4. traffic light detection/automatic braking
  5. enforced following distance

(I'd add "sleep/impaired driver warnings", automatic emergency braking (including pedestrian detection) even though it doesn't quite relate to the top causes of accidents))

Here's the top ten:

  1. Distracted Driving
  2. Drunk Driving 
  3. Speeding
  4. Reckless Driving
  5. Rain
  6. Running Red Lights
  7. Night Driving
  8. Design Defects/Maintenace
  9. Tailgating
 10. Wrong-Way Driving/ Improper Turns

[gravy]

Far more cars (than planes), far more drivers (than pilots), far less rules for permission (than a driver's license). Kind of an unfair comparison here.