This in fact just a difference in thought in legal culture.
In the US I have noticed the right to drive is in fact a right. One must have the ability to manouvre and for that the automobile has been deemed to be the optimal choice for the individual. Thus situations where something goes wrong in traffic are deemed accidents more often than not. A murder would require intent and I have a feeling a murder with an automobile would be almost impossible to prove. Hence, if you want to kill someone, drive over them with a car.
Unfortunately although I live in Europe, my country thinks the car as a holy cow which shall not be touched, similiar to the US.

Now the real deal of dealing with car accidents is the way used in the Netherlands. It fits my legal mind frame as a law student much better than the idea that you are exempted from all responsibility if only you are driving a car
So how it goes in the netherlands. Every time you start up your car you acknowledge the fact that you are going to be driving around with a vehicle capable of deadly force, a de facto deadly weapon. Pursuant to this idea every accident that happens between car and anyone else is almost automatically the fault of the car driver. It can feel unfair in situations where a cyclist rides under the car from a blind spot. But the idea is that while driving a car the driver must account for everything and keep his/her speed so slow that no accidents occur. It is the responsibility of the driver that he or she never collides against a weaker road user, even if it means inching forwards 5mph.

This of course is in a country that has a functioning public transport and bicycle infrastructure.

The system mentioned above is not optimal for all situations of course, but it surely is better than what we or the US has.
What I think would be optimal would be a system where a driver who kills a weaker road user would be sentenced for murder of the third degree if the weaker road user could not be shown to be breaking the rules applying to said road user or the said road user was not grossly negligent of road safety or rules.
So basically rear ending a cyclist on an open road would automatically be murder, but driving over a cyclist who blew a stop sign would be somewhat more interesting and would depend on the speed of the cyclist, collision force etc. Driving over a pedestrian would have to be quite exeptional to avoid sentence for example someone hid behind your car before you start reversing (I have seen this happen...). Speeding and colliding with a cyclist would of course be worse than going under the limit (duh, the cyclist might even live if the collision was weaker). And it is a limit, not an indication of how fast you should be driving, a limit of how fast your maximum can be. You can drive under the limit if you want to. In fact depending on the car I drive I usually drive 100km/h on a 120km/h road assuming it has four lanes.