I think most people would prefer no delays and a private ride. But the savings of pooling is too large for many to ignore.
The market exists for both though. It's a smart move to offer this option. It's more energy economical and fiscally responsible. There's certainly even people who have the time but not the money.
Second time was also a 'pool' with no additional riders, so it was a happy accident for a cheaper ride. Perhaps people bet on that as well?
It's fundamentally silly for millions of commuters to each travel in their own car, and robot cars aren't going to fix that. Buses make massively more efficient use of road space (when they're reasonably full, anyway).
Robot cars should reduce accidents, and parking problems will go away, but they won't magically reduce congestion on commuter routes. But car-pooling will.
Imagine an existing excellent bus network, like London's, but with completely dynamic routes, and a variety of bus sizes suitable for different times of day. Open the app and tell it where you're going, and it tells you which bus stop and bus number you need.
Maybe, maybe not. Small one-person "pod" cars that link up into road trains automatically are also a possibility, and have basically the same benefit for congestion as sharing without actually sharing the same pod.
It would be a big R&D problem to make it work at all. Even if it worked, is a train like that really going to be as efficient as a bus? And finally, even if those obstacles are overcome, it seems like everyone has to buy the same model (or at least compatible models, and who's going to make that happen?) to get decent economies of scale.
On the other hand -- in-flight refueling is a kind of similar problem that sounds similarly unlikely, but actually works!
On the other other hand, that's a very specialized (and I'm guessing very expensive) system that isn't used by commercial airlines. I think pod-trains will go roughly the same way.