I think you're missing a few factors. Most critically, DARPA has some success because they have a customer (the DoD) with specific requirements and a nearly unl

I think you're missing a few factors. Most critically, DARPA has some success because they have a customer (the DoD) with specific requirements and a nearly unlimited source of funding compared to any other government initiative. The Defense Department probably wastes more money each year on meandering, unfinishable snake-oil projects than has been spent on driverless car R&D by all entities in all of history. But it's true that driverless car tech is unlikely to come out of direct government funding. Instead, that money should be going to fund quality education at all levels, and to build proven technologies that would solve many of the same problems the driverless-car pipe dream would only be an inferior version of--ie high speed rail links in the middle distance where it's a better form of transport than cars (driverless or not) and planes.