interesting debate about the deskilling of drivers.
certainly as cars have become safer/better built/better tech one would expect fatalities and injuries to decline dramatically over time but that is not the same as the total number of collisions per number of cars on the road.
at the same time, most cars are made out of plastic so maybe more collisions get reported these days. in the past if no one was hurt why report a collision/file an insurance claim to fix a dent in a steel bumper when you could just bang it out yourself. but today if someone rear ends me they have probably cracked my rear (plastic) bumper so i have to report a collision/file an insurance claim because i cant fix it myself.
so im not sure how accurate collision stats would be anyways.
as for driveless cars,
yeah good point. in the interim as people switch over/ buy new cars there will be a lot of problems but will those problems still exist when every car on the road is an automated one?
if every car was computer controlled and each car was operating on the same network and the network was working properly, then presumably there would never be another accident (or as close to zero as possible) because every car would know what the other cars around it were doing and could act accordingly.