Re: Insurance
"People are already (even if begrudgingly) paying those prices, so why would a company charge much less when the difference is potentially profit?"
Competition. As long as there are excess profits to be made (above the normal rate of return to capital, factoring in risk) in an industry, people will pile into it until they've all been competed away.
"autonomous cars aren't going to be cheap for quite some time, so you'll be paying extra to offset the company's investment. "
There's no reason for them to be significantly more expensive than current cars, really - they can be much more specialised instead of having to be all-rounders. And they will have much higher utilisation rates than current cabs.
" there's another issue - the time it takes to get a car to you. If I want to shoot out to Tesco in a hurry, I walk out to my car, and off I go. Waiting 5-10 mins for a self-driving car to turn up somewhat undermines the "shite... I forgot %s, just shooting out" element."
Maybe that's just a bad choice of example, but surely the whole point is that you wouldn't have to go to Tesco in that situation, because the autonomous vehicle would be able to bring you what you wanted?
Apart from that, if there were sufficiently high usage rates, you'd have to live somewhere properly remote not to have a car come free near you in next to no time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
