"While technology and business development will remain key short-term goals for the industry, 2018 saw an increasingly prominent focus on the “safety conversation.” As self-driving technology matures and approaches broader commercialization, we are seeing an increase in conversations that seek to better quantify how safe AVs are."

"A number of advocates have argued that AVs should be evaluated just as humans are – with a road test. While it’s not clear that we should settle for the imperfect way that things have been done for human drivers, there is some intuitive logic to the basic idea of measuring AV safety by seeing if they can navigate public roads successfully, minimizing accidents or software failures."

"When considered as part of a broader suite of technologies and policies, self-driving cars hold enormous potential to significantly reduce the estimated 100 daily and 40,000 annual fatalities on U.S. roadways — a death rate of epidemic proportions."

"When President Donald Trump announced in March that the federal government would return to its original schedule for updating fuel efficiency standards, few noticed the location of the speech – a test facility for autonomous vehicles on the site of a former Ford aviation factory."

"We’re in a very exciting time now in transportation because new technologies, whether it’s self-driving cars or innovations like Uber and Lyft have created new options for people to get access to transportation and whether we’re talking about people with disabilities or the rest of the population, the change is happening very rapidly and this offers the potential to address some of the obstacles with transportation that have impact with people with disabilities."

"Such was the message we gleaned Thursday night at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, where we had the chance to sit down with Chris Urmson, the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company that (among many others) is endeavoring to make self-driving technologies a safer and more widely adopted alternative to human drivers."

Chris Urmson presents driverless cars at TED2015. 

"At the end of 2016, Chris Urmson, Drew Bagnell, and Sterling Anderson created the startup to deliver fully self-driving technology—no human involvement—and will start with operations in geofenced areas (somewhere), slowly expanding as the cars prove themselves."

"The U.S. DOT Volpe Center welcomed Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora as the sixth speaker in its 2018 thought leadership series, Transportation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics. Urmson has helped advance the state of the art of self-driving vehicles over the last 15 years."

"The benefits of self-driving cars are that they handle the mundane parts of driving, especially in urban environments, Urmson said."