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I can't imagine there won't be huge patent fights. Whatever is needed to make self driving work is clearly non-obvious or it would be done by now.

It may be the case of just throw enough ideas together and that works, in which case it may be effectively a commodity; everybody working on it has enough patents that cross-licensing works. Or it might be there's one key idea that makes everything work, and whoever files first controls it for whatever a patent lasts these days. Kind of depends which company owns that patent how it goes.