This assumes most people don't want car ownership.
Edit:
No these services aren't suitable for everyone but they're suitable for a huge and growing amount of people, urbanization and civilization are the same thing. ICEs filling cities like Beijing carrying 1-2 people is literally killing people.
"The Census Bureau defines "urban" for the 1990 census as comprising all territory, population, and housing units in urbanized areas and in places of 2,500 or more persons outside urbanized areas."
I don't see the "shared asset" model working at all. Not clear if it even works at the moment -- Uber's business is mostly cream-skimming the wealthiest users. But a self driving fleet can serve most rural communities as well (at the expense of a lower utilization rate than in urban areas). A car sitting in a driveway most of the time is a very expensive luxury. Most rural communities are less wealthy than most urban areas. A set of self-driving vehicles near by is a lot cheaper than a lot of idle cars.
Electric, and pay-by-the-ride are not panaceas. It's an 80/20 breakdown. I have, at one point, lived a ninety minute drive from the nearest town. I don't see how electric can handle what is really an edge case. I also don't understand the economics of electric utes (pickup trucks).
One comment of mine, there is one gas station in his town, if that ever closed it'd make owning a gasoline powered car a right PITA because the next gas station is 40 miles away.
"17 million new vehicles are sold per year in the US. Assume self driving vehicles replace 25% of those sales, eliminating the need for the rest (just for giggles). That's 12,750,000 vehicles that don't need to be built and sold per year. At the average sales price of a new car ($35K), that's $446,250,000,000 ($446 billion) in loans that don't need to be taken out, or capital that must be committed to purchasing those vehicles, and the same amount of labor that must be expended to repay the loans on those vehicles."
I get that these numbers are very hand wavy, but I think they illustrate the scale of the effects of self driving electric vehicle rideshare networks.
The low-mileage used car owners purchased at a higher price or buyers will use worse financing options. The dealership has an incentive to get the old models out, and the financial backing to cut interest, resulting in their being able to sell new cars for less than a low-mileage used model.
Sure there are social reasons for car ownership but then again I see kids less and less interested in the car ecosystem. Hell, the mini I bought in 2009 devoted 40% of its manual to the entertainment system, which I consider a good thing.
The shift from cloth production->clothing purchase (many years ago) and from cooking to eating out (more recent) et al demonstrate that people are happy to outsource work when it's convenient and financially beneficial.
All shared vehicles do is distribute that same cost though. The owners of the shared fleets aren't going to no recoup those costs. If anything it simply makes the lost money less visible, but still equally present. (Feel free to argue that the actual costs are less with more sharing)
I feel the same way about housing stock, BTW; the US model of home ownership only works because it is heavily subsidized by the federal government as a longstanding matter of policy (not counting the tax deduction for interest which simply preys upon people's financial ignorance). Almost everyone in the US would be better off it a set of large companies/REITs owned the majority of the housing stock and most people rented.
I have gotten rid of my car because Uber/Lyft and public transport/biking are SO much cheaper than owning a car. On the order of a few hundred dollars a month (if I had gotten a new car and insurance).
Additionally, I don't spend time parking or with car maintenance nor do I worry about speeding. In addition, I have more time to make or take phone calls on the road, do some light work on a laptop (with a mobile hotspot) or if I'm feeling tired, just nap.
Despite initial concerns, Ubering and Lyfting is simpler, faster, easier and far, far less stressful than driving. This only compounds for longer trips. There is nothing like an hour-long Uber ride where you basically take a nap and wake up when you've reached your destination or just calmly listening to a podcast or watching an online lecture and being able to take notes.
Now, that said, I'm becoming an avid outdoors person and I want a vehicle I can take on trips that can stow my gear. I use a car rental service for this (currently Turo) and that works well but, I wish there was a service that let me borrow my friends' cars but, got a daily insurance rider so that their asset would never be at risk and that I would be in compliance with the law in California that requires all drivers to have insurance. Something like what Google's ridesharing is doing but, for car borrowing.
Put a per-mile fee on there based on IRS mileage, slap a $5 per rental fee for putting all of this together and boom, you have something that would really revolutionize things.
The business logic behind the insurance could be very different, a lot would be known about the journey to be undertaken, the app could be recording what really is happening, with a source of crash sensors and satnav it should be possible to identify what happened in ways current insurance can't do. You could make it so an app has to run during a one-off insurance permit, you could not do that for normal insurance.
You could get different rates for different cars that you can borrow, therefore if making a big one-off journey it might pay to borrow the eco-mini-car instead of something flash. Going into town then the sportscar might be worth the higher rate as the journey could be short. So you could end up borrowing different cars.
Now if you allow some charge back to the owner 'profit' then people just might have a fair incentive to lend you their vehicle. The app could even tell them how many pennies they are to earn.