I expect these to be fully-equipped roving surveillance and oppression machines:

• Each car can be covertly equipped with a suite of LPR or facial recognition cameras, sensors, and signals intelligence equipment.

• Autonomous cars can patrol and surveil large areas to gather intelligence while acting as innocuous taxis.

• Journalists, brown people, or pregnant woman making the mistake of entering one of these could simply be recognized and driven to a “detention” center for arrest.

• Vehicles can autonomously work in tandem to hunt down and assault other vehicles, or serve as transport for domestic military operations, or blockade roads.

• Service can be selectively denied to certain areas or social groups to curtail and manage movement during protests or events.

I mean, just use your imagination as to how an authoritarian federal government could collude with a Fascist tech CEO to leverage a large autonomous robo-taxi fleet set upon the population

Whoa, that's scary, but you probably right

It feels like we're heading for the bad part of Manna faster and faster. If you haven't read Manna, do yourself that service and spend 45 minutes read it. It used to be free on the authors website, but, the website was removed, when the author died, but it's easy to find