I don't have any proof that a market exists for these cars right now, but I can make up a story that suggests that a real market is indeed at play. There's a p

I don't have any proof that a market exists for these cars right now, but I can make up a story that suggests that a real market is indeed at play. There's a proven market need for that entire field of technology in general, the market of "doing things that were never before humanly possible while making billions of dollars in profit along the way". A self-driving car is a plausibly viable product, in that a person can imagine that it would provide him or her with personal safety, convenience, relief from effort, and extra leisure/work time. By itself, it could have a significant lifestyle effect both in terms of commuting and travel. However, even if it were not especially economically viable by itself, it would serve as a highly useful prototype and legislative precedent for the rather more dangerous and less sympathetic self-driving truck. The self-driving truck has advantages over the operated truck that go far beyond the savings in wages when all the truck drivers lose their jobs. It can operate continually and consistently, with lower maintenance costs; it can be prepositioned or rerouted at a moment's notice; it can integrate efficiently with other aspects of an partially automated logistics chain. It will create new value. In turn, it will serve as a prototype for other motile robotics technologies required by a fully automated logistics chain, all of which - taken together - will be a crucial step towards the full automation of the means of production. It is plausible that the major automotive manufacturers are more than happy to treat the self-driving car as a loss-leader. This is just a story I made up, rather than an authoritative or informed opinion, but I believe that it's fairly typical of the "imaginative futurist" version of the case for self-driving cars.