> If people own their self-driving cars I suppose there's also a chance they can opt-out of software updates, which would potentially be very dangerous.

Auto insurance companies would probably have a clause saying that their policy is void if the vehicle isn't updated within X days of the software update becoming available and that would be the end of that.

Brings to mind the situation the SodaStream company is in in most countries: pressurized gas canisters aren't safe for untrained people to do maintenance on (e.g. refill) themselves, so it's mostly illegal to own them without a license. Thus, the company operates a 'club' that lends them to people, so that the people are never the legal property-owners of the bottles. But this allows the 'club' to be able to recall the bottle at any time, and since it's not yours, you have to comply.

I assume a lease program with baked in maintenance costs and a lockout if maintenance is skipped would suffice.

Edit: And I assume the car could drive itself to preventive maintenance appointments if it's something that can't be done OTA.

Or just decertify outdated systems.

I guess "DRM" for self driving cars is something people will complain about, but for vehicles that have controls it doesn't seem real horrible to have an autonomous system do a check to see if it is still licensed.

There could be an emergency override if the person that needed the vehicle didn't know how to drive, an override that automatically issued a fixit ticket.

The thing is that today the average age of cars on the road is something like ten years. Many people don't and many people can't afford to buy new vehicles. They may not have the money to deal with that fixit ticket which probably has to be handled by a licensed service station with a lot of fancy equipment.

So, if all this comes to pass, you'll end up with a system where the wealthy lease or ride-share their self-driving cars while the plebes are stuck with trying to keep their manually driven clunkers running.

Sure, I was talking about addressing a particular safety issue with autonomous vehicles, not trying to solve economic inequality.

However, if autonomous vehicles are just for the wealthy end of society whether directly or by way of limo and taxi services, they're not going to be particularly welcomed by everyone else (aka the majority of voters).