Initially in this decade I fully subscribed to your view, on paper. Then I observed how things panned out and thought some more.
Here's a grim reality: at ~3 million per death in a car crash (that was a reasonable estimate of insurance cost, overall, a decade ago or so), with ~37k deaths/year in motor vehicule accidents in the USA for instance, that's roughly $100 billion / year — a mere 0.5% of its $20 trillion GDP. So I'm not holding my breath for public or private action at a massive scale (think that fracking alone was orders of magnitude more profitable for the US, and came with a strong geopolitical advantage to boot with).
Do the math for your country, $3M/death over GDP, it's usually negligible compared to "the big thing" that your local politicians and corporations keep talking about.
Even in Western Europe, where
- regulation is people's #1 method for solving everything and anything,
- "the value of life" is emphasized every other speech and publication and actual social security systems, free medical care, free education even, etc. (a few hundred bucks away from actual UBI, for real),
- companies could actually compete (Europe has 0 tech giant, but several big car manufacturers),
you don't hear a lot of political or popular or private (business) support for Level 4 infrastructure (L4: roads dedicated to self-driving cars, likely to kill ~1000x less than human-driven roads, not to mention the economic gain of time while commuting and travelling by road, which whether work or leisure is a net psychological gain).
Actually L4 is not even a "topic" in many such countries (let alone L5), it's a curiosity, a funny segment to wrap up the news. Even though L4 is totally doable NOW. What you actually hear is much fear about tech — as usual. That's about it for self-driving cars.
I have no idea why, it makes no sense to me, but even if rich cosy comfortable life-adoring 35h/week western Europe doesn't want it bad, I don't know who does/will, in the short/medium term.
The above "grim reality" is just my way of fishing for answers, really. I don't know. I'm just skeptical that self-driving cars are a thing that people or leaders (public and private) actually want. I hear much, much resistance to the idea and very little interest for the upsides from the mainstream. I sees smiles and eyes rolling, and 10 years later there is still no decent infrastructure to charge EVs except Tesla's — a foreign entity, by far the biggest promoter of it all, but can they do it? Can they reach L5 or politically negociate L4? Back to the above concerns, or absence thereof really, of the mainstream.
It's like space, basically: it would be incredibly little of the world's GDP to put massively more effort and shorten industrial-scale space activities dramatically — like if it's 30 years away at current rate, we could make it by 2030 really easily, without pushing it far (nothing like a war effort for instance). And the benefits are so immense it's basically stupid to argue against, the question is how to do it best. And yet it's still anecdotal in most countries budget, it's mostly just PR. Even as we speak, a "prime time" for space as a topic of (positive) interest for the mainstream. Go figure.
Self-driving cars, it seems, are met with even more political and social resistance than they are made impossible by idealistic goals, because the former is a current showstopper whereas our current technological capacities are not.