Technology Assessment: Emerging Automotive Technologies for the Future

The continuous increase in human population is accompanied with more transportation demand. As a result, the pressure on transportation infrastructure has increased beyond the ability of infrastructure to catch up, leading to increased number of traffic incidents and road congestions [45, 46]. In the USA, there are more than 6 million traffic accidents, including fatality accidents that kill more than 30 thousand people every year [47]. Also, road congestion leads to a cost of about 4.8 billion hours of time, 1.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel (equivalent to 2 months operation of the Alaska Pipeline), and $101 billion in combined delay and fuel costs, aside from cost associated with travel time and dependability [17, 47, 49].