This is the same problem current safety tech already has. We have cars that can stop themselves in most situations already - things like that + lane detection + distracted/sleepy driver detection would do wonders if everyone had them even without full autonomy.
But they also all add cost to new vehicles, and the average age of vehicles on the road reflects that. It's been climbing, looks like 11.5 years now.[0]
Looks like there's about 260M cars in the US, and on average only ~18M new ones sold each year[1]. Let's go conservative, and say we just need to replace 200M cars with current-or-near-future tech ones to save 30K lives a year. Let's say a 30K car has the level of tech we want. 200M * 30K = 6 trillion.
But car crashes are like 2% or fewer[2] of all deaths in the US. So that's a massive cost that might be much better spent elsewhere. It's not that we can't make cars safer - we can already do that! - it's that there are some much more appealing ways to spend the money if approaching it from a non-commercial perspective.
Furthermore, I assume that many cars on the roads today don't have the most modern air bag systems and passive features that increase survivability in a crash. To say nothing of the fact that they're simply old which certainly isn't likely to help with their likelihood to get in a crash or survive one.
I expect that if every car in the US were replaced with a new one with most of the available modern safety features, you'd reduce the current fatality rate by a very significant percentage.
One of my vehicles is quite old. But I'm not going to replace it just to get new safety features.
But they also all add cost to new vehicles, and the average age of vehicles on the road reflects that. It's been climbing, looks like 11.5 years now.[0]
Looks like there's about 260M cars in the US, and on average only ~18M new ones sold each year[1]. Let's go conservative, and say we just need to replace 200M cars with current-or-near-future tech ones to save 30K lives a year. Let's say a 30K car has the level of tech we want. 200M * 30K = 6 trillion.
But car crashes are like 2% or fewer[2] of all deaths in the US. So that's a massive cost that might be much better spent elsewhere. It's not that we can't make cars safer - we can already do that! - it's that there are some much more appealing ways to spend the money if approaching it from a non-commercial perspective.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-c...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...