>Isn't the idea that ...

Sure, in the sense that's the idea behind lots of things. But there is an awful lot of handwaving about how to concretely get there.

The overall goal of using self-driving technology to reduce human deaths and injuries is clearly admirable. What's less clear is a) if it is technologically achievable and b) if any of the current efforts are scaled appropriately to get there over a decade or two.

The early self-driving hype was pretty depressing to behold. It was obviously an Apollo sized or bigger effort, and people were actually getting traction with the laughable idea that we'd "get there" in 2-3 years with a few 10k of engineers (or less, I'm estimating conservatively).