Personally I think the path forward for autonomous cars goes hand-in-hand with services like Uber. First you need there to be a population of people who can get

Personally I think the path forward for autonomous cars goes hand-in-hand with services like Uber. First you need there to be a population of people who can get by without owning cars and have them rely exclusively on driving service. Then you slowly augment the driving service with autonomous vehicles when these folks are going to be traveling along routes that are supported by the cars. These routes will likely be an order of magnitude cheaper to travel, since there is no human driver. The market dynamics combined with the steady march forward of the capabilities of the autonomous cars will do the rest. In other words, I think it's pretty unlikely you will just wake up one day and swap out your car for a self driving one to drive you around. Eventually, maybe, but fundamentally it will be less about which car you own and more about if you own a car at all. In the long run if autonomous vehicles are successful it makes little sense to own a car anyway, so it's only logical that the early adopters naturally be non-owners.