I was just going off personal experience here; I consider myself to be a safe/defensive driver, trained well by my late DF who was a professional driver (buses etc). He had a regular office job Mon-Fri when I was little but would then drive buses all weekend, officially for extra family income but the truth was that he just really loved driving. Especially buses or even trolleybuses!
I probably drive more carefully than most. More carefully than DH, even though he's better since meeting me, but I'm still the default driver in our family. Much more carefully than DB and his wife, both of whom honestly scare me if they give me a lift anywhere! Definitely more carefully than FIL, who is an arrogant dickhead on the road and thinks the rules don't apply to him and that he's invincible. And my experience of taking taxis locally is that they zoom around, accelerating and braking unnecessarily hard, and speeding in 20/30 mph limit zones. I also usually have to ask them not to set off until our seatbelts are fastened, otherwise they just go and passengers are left unrestrained and now finding it even harder to find the seatbelt bits because the car is moving. Sometimes they've even put waterproof seat covers on the back seats that partly or fully restrict access to the bit you need to click your seatbelt into!
So it's not actually often that I'm driven by somebody else these days, and prior to getting my own licence in the mid-1990s it was really only DF and DM that would drive me about. I guess that's why I'm more unused to, and horrified by, unsafe driving practice when I do get into somebody else's car.
But I would absolutely sit in the front passenger seat when travelling with a friend. Although, if there was more than one passenger, I'd always still be the one volunteering to sit in the back! Bit hard to sit in the back without causing offence if the front seat is otherwise free, though. So on balance I decide to take the risk of being in an accident and possibly coming off worse as a result of being in the front, rather than cause serious offence and lose a friendship.
DD is 14 now and still sits in the back, behind me, even if the front seat is free. She does occasionally get in the front now if there's a particular reason to, but never on the motorway. This is actually her choice, as she's sensible and knows how much safer she is in the back. DH, if with us, will sit in the front. I'm a bit more comfortable with that because car safety is designed with the average adult male in mind, so the safety features in the front of the car are more likely to protect him effectively than DD in the event of a crash. Yet another way in which the patriarchy likes to screw us over, taking male as the default and putting women at more risk!