Once again you have confused the timing and thus risk of investment with quantity. Furthermore, and trivially, donations by private citizens such as Carnegie ar

Once again you have confused the timing and thus risk of investment with quantity. Furthermore, and trivially, donations by private citizens such as Carnegie are not a socialization of costs. The simple fact remains that taxpayers have made significant and critical investments in nurturing AV technology, like many other technologies that Silicon Valley has commercialized once they bore fruit. Your fundamental premise that investments that are "minuscule" in size are necessarily minuscule in significance is trivially wrong.