Car, take me there!

Google and others have been playing around (quite successfully) with self-driving cars. Wouldn't it be great if we all had access to one of those? And while sitting in traffic, we could go ahead and do email, play on Facebook (or Instagram, or whatever is popular then), watch movies, etc. Or partake in any of these other activities?

However, I don't think moving to a primarily autonomous vehicle world would be as incremental as people think.

I've come to a similar conclusion as the linked article that individual car ownership would become obsolete. Even a heavy commuter only uses their car 2-3 hours a day, why would they pay for the other 21 hours if they didn't need to? If you no longer own your car, you wouldn't spend a bunch of money configuring it to your liking either. We'd probably end up with a smaller selection of vehicles in the world, primarily differentiated by size. Granted this is all on the pretty far end of the spectrum of possibilities, we may instead just see Uber-esque companies pop up that maintain a fleet that we can all share. Come to think of it, most usage would be in commuter hours, which would leave a lot of cars sitting around ... I suppose we'd see higher rates at those times.

All of the above would grow organically along some path. We can speculate all we want, but most likely it would just happen as it makes sense. What is a lot harder to figure out for me is the licensing model and responsibility.

If I buy a self-driving car, who is liable if it's found guilty of an infraction? I see two major possible models:

1. The company who created the software (or possibly shared with the automaker who put the software on the car). While some estimates state that accidents would reduce by an order of magnitude or more and fatalities would drop from 30,000 to around 1,000 per year, no company in the world would sign up for potentially being liable for all, some, or even any of those fatalities. So would the company make the consumer sign some blanket no-fault agreement? Would you, as a consumer, accept all liability when, inevitably, a bug causes a crash? This is essentially a central responsibility model and probably doesn't scale well.

2. The company who created the software sells a license to the user. The user then installs it and takes the robot to get a license. The robot is associated with the car and the person from an insurance and liability standpoint. The responsibility is shared somehow (though it's not quite clear to me how this would happen well).

Just musing out loud here, but I think the license/responsibility model is the biggest barrier to autonomous cars. That, and the lack of fun-to-drive-ness. Can software robots drive stick?