How can one party be a "jackass" if both cars are autonomous?
From a futurist perspective, I imagine there might be scenarios of people taking manual control and causing an accident or manufacturers writing bad software. Imagine if Toyota's newest update causes 10x as many crashes. Why should I subsidize their incompetence via my personal insurance premiums?
If autonomy happens, ideally, the car companies should be paying insurance. The same way they pay for warranty. Its all in their control and its an incentive to keep them honest and care about making cars that don't crash.
Even if we have a no fault insurance scheme for only unmodded autonomous cars that means the manufactures have no incentives to make their cars safer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
I imagine there are many personality types who only behave because it would cost them too much to misbehave. My gut feeling is that this is probably 80% of the population.
If you think about that, that hardly even makes sense. "Incompetence" has been a perfectly normal part of the insurance package for a long time. I assure you measurable amounts of what you've paid in insurance have already gone to "incompetence".
Once you do tell them you've altered the programming on the cars computer they are more than likely to tell you to find someone else crazy enough to insure you.
The self drive feature of a car is about to get very proprietary, like a flight system there is going to be assurances that the software the manufacturer installed is the same one that's running. Crash investigators are going to have a tonne of information from these cars (Assuming they don't blow up in a Michael Bay style crash).
Use of self driving cars hockeysticks-># of human drivers plummets->premiums skyrocket for remaining human drivers.
It also might work out that self driving vehicles end up reducing the rates for human drivers. I think a lot of road risk actually comes from a small pool of drivers, who will tend to be the most eager to stop insuring themselves. So even if if the pool of human drivers shrinks a lot, the risk involved could lead to lower rates than we see today.
[0] http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/DOT-Miles-...
Humans aren't obsolete yet, but we're well on our way.