You're right, but just as a correction on your numbers, you're vastly underestimating the amount of potential lives saved because of the implicit assumptions that humans only exist in the USA, and that self-driving technology developed in the USA will only benefit Americans when it comes to safety.
There's more than 1 million road fatalities yearly according to the WHO[1]. Once the technology is developed it'll be rapidly exported, just in the EU there's around 25k deaths/yr[2], another 4k in Japan[3] etc.
So even if you only include countries and other areas with a similar GDP as the US (which could purchase self-driving vehicles at a similar rate) you easily get upwards of 100k deaths/yr.
As a non-American I still think that underestimating is the right approach for the simple reason that it pre-empts a "but why should we pay with [whichever country you use] lives" argument from a certain subset. Restricting the estimate to "number of lives saved in the country the testing is done" gives an outcome that is much harder to argue against.
There's more than 1 million road fatalities yearly according to the WHO[1]. Once the technology is developed it'll be rapidly exported, just in the EU there's around 25k deaths/yr[2], another 4k in Japan[3] etc.
So even if you only include countries and other areas with a similar GDP as the US (which could purchase self-driving vehicles at a similar rate) you easily get upwards of 100k deaths/yr.
1. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/en/
2. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ED...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...