Can autonomous vehicles make crashes a thing of the past?

This year, Google’s self-driving cars logged a total of 700,000 miles of crash-free autonomous driving. The cars, which operate in their hometown of Mountain View, California, are now sophisticated enough track hundreds of objects simultaneously, including pedestrians, an indicating cyclist, a stop sign held by a crossing guard, or traffic cones. However, these cars come at a price, and there is around US$150,000 of equipment in each car performing real-time LIDAR and 360-degree computer vision, the result of years of development.

Less-costly technologies such as Electronic Stability Control (ESC), Forward Collision Warning (FCW), Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), and Lane Keep Assist (LKA) can already control a car, and will bring about increased autonomy to the industry over the next few years. In the mean time, Google will try and overcome the many problems it has to deal with to bring the autonomous cars into real-life scenarios. But will autonomous cars ever be ready for real-life, everyday usage, and given the association the industry is making between autonomous cars and safety, can they ever make crashes a thing of the past?