Insurance seems really weird to me with self driving cars. It seems like the driver being insured is Tesla Motor Co not Bill Smith. Bill just owns the car, he doesn't drive it.

I've noticed a lot of automation legally still require a warm body to take the blame. Seems like eating your cake and having it too.

Ignore Tesla. Yes Elon is going to keep saying they're selling a "Self driving" car but Elon's lawyers are going to keep telling anybody who gets into an accident they were driving because Elon isn't really selling a self-driving car.

Waymo are driving, there is no warm body, in accidents where a Waymo self driving taxi struck somebody that's on Waymo, you're just a passenger the same as if you were in a New York cab, or a Uber, or if an A320 you're sat in smacks into a post because the pilots took a corner too close. You're not the one who needs insurance, because you're not driving, Waymo is.

Agree that Tesla isn't self driving in the technical sense. However, given public perception and number of units.. Tesla is what 99% to 99.9% of consumers will interact with in the "self driving" space.

Even Waymo still has some safety drivers per the article linked. And if we are going to constrain our analysis to self driving pilot programs, then we need to constrain the comparison to the same geofenced area. Arguably there are not a lot of fatal accidents per 1M miles on the local roads of Phoenix/SanFran by human drivers either.