As a person who looks at wrecks on the street level in middle America I'm still not convinced that there's any real issue here.

The article you're referencing is mainly about shuttle type vehicles in amusement parks and the like. Aside from not being on an actual track (even though they'll be on a virtual one), and having some collision sensors, these "cars" are not the same as something you and I are driving.

Self-driving vehicles have many more hurdles to cross than just inclement weather before they are autonomous to the point where the blind/drunk/elderly/disabled can use them without any worry about having to take the wheel. And until that point the vehicle will basically be turning-over the most difficult decision-making driving responsibilities to manual driving.

Among the other issues I see:

• The turnover-rate of the US auto fleet is slow enough that the average car is now more than ten years old. Manually operated vehicles aren't going away anytime soon.

• Self-driving vehicles require a road database with six-inch accuracy. Somebody is going to have to take financial and legal responsibility for creating & maintaining this system.

• It's unrealistic to believe that vehicles will ever be completely autonomous to the point where they no longer require any ability to operate them manually. At present we would require a level of artificial intelligence that does not exist yet. In the future you'll still have to be able to have some way not to put the entire nation's transportation system at risk from black swan events like a regional blackout or a solar storm. So you'll always need to underwrite for some level of manual operation.

• A dearth of liability & physical damage losses is not a bad thing for society as a whole. Insurers will just charge less premium and pay commensurately fewer losses. Somebody will still need to deal with comprehensive losses because self driving cars probably won't affect loss rates from hail, flood, fire, trees, many animal collisions (side hits from retarded deer), and angry ex-girlfriends.

I'm not particularly concerned about the situation working in the field. I'm actually rather optimistic since these vehicles will be wildly more complicated than what's on the road now, thus necessitating people with higher level technical skills to evaluate the damages. I'll just be looking at bigger individual losses on fewer cars.