With that said, this is sort of the point: SDVs would be close to arms reach of pedestrians virtually all the time, so I'd imagine that when all is said and done, the safety/regulatory barrier ought to be an extremely high hurdle to overcome.

There are many things that we can talk about in terms of "if only X was solved, that would change the world" (e.g. X being the cure for cancer, or X being singularity, etc). But the devil is of course in the details: until we know what X is, it _could_ be a single breakthrough but it most likely is a nearly insurmountable wall of a million factors). For SDVs, X is L5 autonomy.