I think you make some good points, but to me, this is just the climax of the left’s wet dream.
For decades they have cajoled and tried to get the government to demand that we all get herded about in buses, trollies, and various other public transit schemes, including carpool lanes. Self driving cars, especially those owned by some company or corporation, will distinctly lesson individual freedom and my guess is that self driving cars are just a stone’s throw away from legislating people to ride share - at best, or turning this all into public transportation.
It’s not hard to imagine the government in the hands of leftists outlawing individual cars and mandating how people will move, i.e., may not move alone unless under strictly limited circumstances to avoid “obscene waste and harmful environmental impacts, such as globull warming”.
No, I have little or no problem with trucking companies developing and using driverless vehicles (assuming safety), but on a mass scale? Only in some totalitarian dystopia.
I don’t like it either, but given technological advances, government “planning,” insurance safety demands and an aging population, it’s coming, just as surely as AI and robotics will put wide swathes of the populace out of work, possibly permanently. Brave new world, and I’m having a tough time seeing the good of it, but I can see the good of it in certain instances if I step out of my current circumstance. Still, it’ll be abused. Such power always is.