It may be practicable way before it is practical — legal problems would be foremost among the difficulties. Who’s to blame when the robot malfunctions? To the tune of how much? Existing insurance law won’t be any guide — that covers human drivers.
The legislature will eventually work out the liability issues.
We should keep an eye on in which room Japan decides to let their humanoid robots go to the bathroom.
Actually we already have existing insurance laws that handle that kind of thing, they just aren’t part of auto insurance. Homeowners and renters insurance already deals with some of this. And as our police forces get more lazy and more and more are refusing to assign blame unless somebody gets seriously hurt or killed auto insurance is learning to become a lot less blame oriented. I live in a city (Tucson) that’s functionally no fault on auto accidents now (like you can’t even get the cops to show up to accidents anymore unless there’s an injury or a car needs to be towed) and honestly it’s worked out better. Having been in accidents before we became no fault and after the whole process is way faster now. I had a friend wait 2 months for his insurance company and the other guy’s couldn’t decide how to divvy responsibility, then it was a couple of weeks to get the check. Now the insurance companies just cover their own people and don’t really worry about it, the only question in my accident in November was if I was in the clear enough for them to waive my deductible (they did), 3 weeks from accident to check, and it would have probably been less if Thanksgiving hadn’t happened, and I could proceed with enough certainty to buy a car 4 days after the accident (I knew I was getting $4G, so I went from there and the “extra” $500 just went into saving).
So really there is a model to proceed on already in place for people who live in places with officially lazy police forces. And Ford, Google and Uber have joined forces on the lobbying effort, and with this being an election/bribe year, I expect things will start dropping into place on the legal front next year.