Every year, 40,000 people die on American roads, and most of these deaths are caused by human error. However, the last few years have seen the creation of cars that drive themselves. Unlike humans, driverless cars have instant response times and never get tired, distracted, or impaired.
In order for self-driving cars to be widely adopted, there are many challenges that need to be addressed: technological, legal, and economical. Thus, we propose that a Manhattan-scale project be created to hasten the mass adoption of self-driving cars, with the end goal to have a low-cost way to retrofit cars with driverless systems.
If we can speed the adoption of this technology by even five years, as many as 200,000 fewer families will have to deal with the pain of losing a loved one.