Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to deal with the steady increase in road traffic while solving transportation related issues such as traffic congestion, pollution, and road safety. Therefore, CAVs are becoming increasingly popular and viewed as the next generation transportation solution. Although modular advancements have been achieved in the development of CAVs, these efforts are not fully integrated to operationalize CAVs in realistic driving scenarios. This paper surveys a wide range of efforts reported in the literature about the CAV developments, summarizes the CAV impacts from a statistical perspective, explores current state of practice in the field of CAVs in terms of autonomy technologies, communication backbone, and computation needs. Furthermore, this paper provides general guidance on how transportation infrastructures need to be prepared in order to effectively operationalize CAVs. The paper also identifies challenges that need to be addressed in near future for effective and reliable adoption of CAVs.