[Erlich_Bachman]

Sometimes it seems that critics of something like self-driving cars want so badly for the project to fail that they themselves fail to see obvious solutions.

The insurance will work much better than it does today, because insurance in it's core is about spreading the risks and calculating exact costs of those risks, it's about calculating statistics of negative events and predicting total costs of such events for the entire fleets.

ALL parts of that equation are just better calculated if all cars were automatic, - you can better calculate number of accidents, you can see details of all accidents because there is blackbox data including videos, you can compare cars to each other because a Tesla with same hardware drives in exactly the same way as another one (which cannot be said for human drivers), they don't have to calculate for weird human risk activities such as drinking or being tired, they can run simulations of the same situation on the same software etc. etc.

Insurance is not going to have any problems, insurance is going to love it and make a lot of money on the self-driving cars, they are a perfect fit for each other. Insurance companies don't even care for whom do they have to pay to, they just care that the statistic of the number of failures is correctly represented and that manufacturers don't lie about those statistics - that is all they care about, they calculate a simple equation, that's all insurance is about...

[supertrope]

Insurers like standards and features that can be easily verified and improve predictability of the crowd. The issue with high tech solutions, especially mono-cultures is malicious hacking or outages of central services that result in simultaneous failure. An insurer can't handle 50% of cars crashing in the same year.