NHTSA found that the Economic and Societal impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, when taking into account harm from pain & suffering and lost wages, is about $877 bi

NHTSA found that the Economic and Societal impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, when taking into account harm from pain & suffering and lost wages, is about $877 billion per year. [1] That means we have a tremendous incentive to make investments which make the roads safer, and lower the crash rate. The single biggest technological advancement to make this possible (without eliminating cars) will be autonomous driving. Today the lowest hanging fruit for self-driving is algorithmic work which allows the car to navigate safely based on its own sensor suite, and mostly by ignoring map data which could be unreliable. Reliance on highly accurate maps and roadway infrastructure is not really a pressing concern, because the cost/benefits of investing in improving the internal algorithm is much higher than the cost/benefits of adding roadway infrastructure for such a small percentage of vehicles to leverage. I believe there will be a cross-over point, where safety for a significant number of vehicles can be significantly improved by making significant changes to road infrastructure to support self-driving. When that day comes, I hope that the USG will be ready to invest on the order of $1 trillion to deploy that infrastructure and ultimately, mandate all new vehicles on public roads are self-driving. I've said it in many comments before - it is a moral imperative to get computers and not humans "behind the wheel". We can afford to spend trillions of dollars to get there, but that's not to say we get there faster by spending trillions of dollars today. [1] - https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/2015sae-blincoe-costs_of_crashes2010.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/2015sae-blin...