Then, Uber and Lyft can have 100% control over where and when we can go.

Going to protest our upcoming wars or financial collapse? No Uber for you.

Want to go down a 2 track, deep into the woods? Sorry, that is an unauthorized route.

that nullifies the potential benefits of self-driving cars for many people with disabilities, present company included.

Gen 1 look like normal cars and require a driver in the seat. Eventually they will look less like cars, and lose the traditional controls. I just think they need to prove themselves before we get there.

There are still going to be imperfect weather problems for a few more years. LiDAR, RADAR, SONAR, and optical sensors have limited range to begin with, and have to process a lot of noise to get to the signal.

Worn out or non-existent lane markers, insufficient contrast between safe and unsafe paths, changes in pavement due to patching (is that a patch or a pothole?), telling the difference between a fire hydrant and a small child, and hackers are going to make the first few years interesting.

I would definitely NOT want to be near Lake St Clair on an early summer evening in a self driving car. The G-D fish fly swarms are going to cause LiDAR systems a migraine.

I'll go find a horse to ride before I get into one of those things.

there are few things more inefficient than single-occupant vehicles, encouraging the continuation of bad decisions in transport planning is not the way to move to a more energy-efficient future.

and electric or at least hybrid. And in the handful of places with decent transportation , they could drop you off at the nearest BART/Metro/MARTA station, and you'd get another one at the other end to get where you're going.

And I welcome it.
No more drunk drivers.
Or 'distracted' drivers.
You may not even own a car.
Just call for one when you need it.
No insurance payments.
No loan payments.

If I was a young, smart, entrepreneur, with some financial backing (gofundme?), I'd be putting together a fleet of Computer Guided Vehicles.
CGVs.
Yes they'd be sensor and computer and GPS guided, but Cee Vee Gee rhymes and just works.
As opposed to HGVs.
Human Guided Vehicles.
They will be vilified, as they should be.

In a lot of ways, I do like the potential safety benefit of self driving cars. And distributing the maintenance and insurance costs among a number of people has some real appeal . Yes, you still have to pay those, it will just be built into the fare like it already is with rideshare and taxis.

But the massive amount of computing power to process the millions of bytes of data required using extremely complex algorithms in 1/20th to 1/50th of a second in order to provide a safe path is a daunting task.

GPS is important, but it suffers from several, sometimes dozens, of meters of error. Driving a vehicle at practical speeds requires precision in the range of 10 to 20 centimeters max.

Very little of this world is sharply contrasted. you need to be able to perform object recognition based on small gradients in constantly changing and electromagnetically noisy conditions. You need to know: is that water coming up 3 cm deep, or 30 cm, or 150cm? Is that a shadow, or a small child?

The cars are not going to be able to hold all the 3-D data it will need in onboard storage. It will HAVE to be able to download current data. Roads do change, get repaved, have construction, or wash out. "Fixed" objects that can be used for precision orientation can be torn down, obstructed, or relocated.

There is a power maximum on lasers and RADAR (a rather low one, if we don't want people cooked or blinded), so they are only capable of true awareness of a couple hundred meters at most, and that depends on the reflectivity of what they are pinging. Optical cameras need to be sharp and clear - rain and snow mess that up pretty quickly.

And being in motion means that every fraction of a second, during even a single LiDAR sweep, the car has substantially changed position and orientation (bouncing up and down).

These are all solvable problems, but it is going to take a coordinated and lengthy effort of extremely intelligent people to do it.

And we better have a plan of what to do about the millions of lost jobs, or their will be social upheaval and sabotage.