Their point is whataboutism to somehow defend autonomous deaths as acceptable.
It’s not whataboutism when you’re comparing the exact same actions and the two things can be substituted for each other.
Whataboutism is “how dare you complain about our gulags when you treat your black people like slaves.” It is not “our system kills people but it kills fewer people than what we currently have.” Especially when killing people is a result of being on the bleeding edge of what’s possible rather than being a deliberate choice to hurt people.
I think, pragmatically, we have to accept that death is the outcome for us all, and trending towards fewer avoidable deaths and longer fuller lives is approximately the aim. Nonetheless deaths from a technology is inevitable.
I believe what you're trying to talk about are excess deaths when a technology is less capable than the incumbent? I'm not sure the stats, but I'd suspect FSD is already superior to the often distracted, sometimes drunk, phone in hand driver that is the norm today.
If chatgpt is to be trusted, Waymo and Tesla FSD are already massively safer than human drivers.
It's not 'whataboutism'. It's an identical situation, and the statistics relate to the same events.