Honestly if autonomous cars can reduce even 10% of accidents caused by drunk driving and other human errors then they will have payed their way and more.
Paying an officer to do something low-risk like camping out next to a road for a shift isn't really expensive. Same with monitoring systems like cameras on traffic lights. Set-up cost is significant, but they probably pay for themselves within a year.
Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?
Arguable. It depends on how badly you want [insert autonomous car producer here] to run your local police department from the cloud.
Having the rules data provided by the government is a fairly straightforward way for the vehicles to work even after the builder repudiates maintenance (maybe that is better said as 'to continue to work longer after', but whatever).
(I'm not worried about the cloud, hand-wringing and paranoia are going to make these things at least function independently or keep them off the road altogether)
In the future? That's a hard question, and I'm sure however the legal system deals with it first will be wholly unfair and illogical. It'll be a battle between car owners, manufacturers, state and federal bodies, cities and counties, certification and safety agencies, etc.
The point is, regulations are not set in stone. Companies can advance the state of the art, and ask the government to regulate less strictly.
As it stands now, self-driving cars are a research project, so we'd expect them to be regulated very strictly. As testing shows them to be safe, then we can relax the regulations. If self-driving cars without a supervising driver end up being safer than a normal car with a normal driver, it would make sense to not require a license. If an accident happens, it happens. Car accidents are nothing new.
If a cop declares "your" car's driving was reckless or too fast for conditions, how exactly do you fight that in court?
Anyway assuming all victims loose 100 years of life...
10e3/190e6 * 24 * 365 * 100 * 0.1 = a delta of 4.6 hrs/day so I think your hyperbole is pretty much mathematically correct.
Our local krispie kreme closed, so the next closest is about 100 miles away, so if a "driveby" was purchased for me, it could actually burn up 4 or 5 hours of my time, especially during rush hour.
The software would have to be written by chimps for it to be worse than human drivers.
I fully expect all kinds of errors to cause human death. I just hope the backlash doesn't destroy something that could save very many lives.