Then the gang is going to have to take out both the self-driving car company AND the cellphone company at the same time. It's not just one getting the data, and again it's going to get noticed immediately if cars start going missing and data is being blocked. They may get ahold of a few dozen cars if they try to do it quickly, but they won't get even hundreds.

The battery may worth something, but it's a lot of effort to steal a car just to get a $15k battery. Criminal gangs aren't stealing 5 year old Kia Niros for resale across the globe, they generally target vehicles worth 3-10x that much.

There's no "source code" for self driving cars in the sense that a video game has source code. The cars have some normal code yes, but the self-driving portion is a trained machine learning model that is essentially a black box. It takes millions of compute hours on high end graphics cards along with millions of hours of driving data to generate a new version of that model. Stealing the existing driving model still won't make it work in West Africa or the Middle East. Stealing the training data wouldn't help get it driving there either, they'd have to collect millions of hours of local training data for each destination.

It would be easier for these gangs to start their own self-driving company.

The benefit to self-driving cars is self-evident though. There's no argument that they wouldn't be better than human drivers in theory. Not only for safety, but for traffic, parking, cost, etc.

The only thing holding them back a this point is refinement. They have already proven that in at least three cities, they are mile for mile safer than human driven vehicles.

Waymo has gone from 1 city, to 3, to now pushing out to 11 in a few years. I wouldn't be surprised if it doubled 5 times again in the next 10 years. That would put it in just under 200 cities by 2035.

The first iPhone only sold a million units in the first year, but two years later there were 25 million iPhones and they hit the 200 million mark by year 5.