If it's debatable what a human should have done in a given situation, you can't really expect a computer to perform better.
That said, when they sell one of these things to a person, how the heck are they going to handle the insurance?
That said, when they sell one of these things to a person, how the heck are they going to handle the insurance?
With autonomous vehicles, two cars of the same model running the same software should be more or less interchangeable. So even leaving aside the number of accidents that occur, the level of uncertainty should be a lot lower.
Insurance companies will hate insuring these cars because the first human fatality is absolutely going to court, and it'll be a complete circus. The media will go apeshit.
This is not the same for human-caused incidents...though we do fixate on pieces of incidental data that might exist: is there a record showing that the driver sent a text right before they crashed? Are there credit car receipts for a bar? Or, in a more extreme case, the medical history of the Germanwings pilot who is believed to have downed his plane.
Once robot taxis are everywhere, I would expect that there will be robot car rentals and robot car long-term rentals. They are also not different from the taxis; people just rent them for longer.
As for real ownership, the question is unclear. Probably, it will be so rare, that a deposit will work too.
Forget Uber. Get a Google-AV subscription, find the nearest "unoccupied" AV (or call for one to come pick you up, preferably scheduled in advance to it's just waiting for you when you get out), hop in, state destination, get off. Car continues on its merry way to its next duty. Repeat when you want to go back home. Much less massive waste of space involved in all those parking lots. Much less opportunity cost waste. Less total cars in existence for the same amount of travelers.
It's like a public transit pass, but the bus stops are exactly where you want them, and the bus passes exactly when you need it, and you don't have to deal with that insane, smelly old guy who dances in the middle of the bus and then shakes peoples' shoulders so they give him pocket change.
There will be a large fluctuation prices as data becomes available but its like insuring any other system ultimately. They calculate the odds, add in their needs, and come up with a figure.
I doubt it'd be significantly different than today since all of these can be switched to manual mode.