But speaking of paying, self driving cars also won't speed, turn right on red without a full stop, etc. Which means traffic tickets would be a thing of the past, along with the revenue they bring in.
If a cop declares "your" car's driving was reckless or too fast for conditions, how exactly do you fight that in court?
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.