Interesting. I interpreted "work in any of the top ten cities" as meaning I could pick any city and it would work. I can see the other interpretation. Hopefully they agree on the parsing!

Liability is easy to solve. Just make the owner of the car responsible. Solved.

If you don't want to accept that risk, don't operate a self driving car.

What do you mean by "operate a self driving car"? That's the point of SAE5: You can't really operate a SAE5 vehicle other than telling it where to go. No steering wheel, no gas pedal, no brake pedal, no nothing. There is no way you could argue that the owner of a SAE5 car is responsible for it. You might as well be legally responsible for the bus, train, airplane you ride in.

Operate as in, put fuel in it, turn it on, tell it where to go. You can operate a dishwasher without washing the dishes yourself.

People are required to buy insurance to operate a vehicle. I don't see how why this needs to be any different.

Companies go out of business. How can a defunct company be held legally liable? Companies and employees can easily die over the 20 year lifetime of a car. Liability can only be placed on the operator.

Companies release new models every year. They get safer every year. Older cars will be more expensive to insure. Will a company want pay the ongoing insurance cost of your 20-30 year old self driving vehicle? What if they can't afford to? Will you still be able to use the car you bought despite the company not being able to insure it? or refusing to insure it (and wanting to force you into a new vehicle purchase)?

All these problems magically go away when you make the operator responsible. They are able to make the choice every month whether they want to continue to pay to insure it, and are legally required to have insurance even if they die in the accident.

Some brands will have better safety, and buying insurance for them will be cheaper. Everyone with the same car model will have pretty much the same insurance rate, unless you are negligent when it comes to maintenance.

Insurance companies are more than capable of calculating these costs. Especially over 10-20 year time frames.

If this sounds crazy to you, it's not that much different than buying liability insurance for pets. Owners are legally responsible.

If you don't want to be legally responsible, don't buy a self driving car. Or a dog for that matter.

No sane person would take that risk. And even if regulations made it a purely civil covered by regulation thing even if the car runs over some kid, I'd fully expect the insurance company to go after the manufacturer.

Drivers are not qualified to assess the safety of a self-driving system. These cars should simply not be allowed on the road unless manufacturers take liability.