If you are correct, what happens to jobs for car body repair shops, cops investigating accidents, lawyers filing accident related lawsuits, judges to rule on those lawsuits, court clerks and bailiffs to process those lawsuits, and the huge auto insurance industry employing millions of people.
But all will not be lost. Jobs will increase for programmers to program computers in driverless cars, technicians to install and repair those computers, lawyers filing class action suits against driverless cars when accidents do happen, judges and court personnel to process those lawsuits etc.
With 94 million Americans without jobs, where is the driver shortage?
I also hear a lot of comments about how these companies will be bankrupted by lawsuits if there are any accidents with these vehicles. I'm not seeing it that way. In the current situation, some 40,000 people are killed annually in the United States alone by car accidents and hundreds of thousands more are injured. There are some 5,000,000 car accidents each year in the U.S. (if you want to include every fender bender). That's pretty astonishing - but we have grown pretty inured to these grisly statistics.
No doubt we are going to have some accidents and fatalities with autonomous cars too but considering where we are at today, there is a huge opportunity to make our highways safer with this technology. Let's face it, human drivers make a lot of stupid mistakes while driving. Be it texting, eating, digging in the glove compartment for something, not paying attention, etc., etc. Even when human drivers do pay attention, they tend to go too fast and make stupid decisions too often. Just go to YouTube and search for "snow/ice crashes" and see the stupidity for yourself.