The more I read about electric autonomous vehicles, the more I feel like we are about to re-create the train technology.
Rail-based navigation is considerably simpler than autonomous driving. The problem is reduced to "how far am I along the track" and "if there is something in my way, it's trespassing on the railway, so make a best effort to detect the obstacle and stop, and beyond that, who cares".
I see what your point is regarding the convenience of using a car. What could be more convenient than leaving your house, getting in your car, then being dropped at your destination? But this doesn't take into account the cost of the entire infrastructure needed to make it work flawlessly. On the other hand, the train goes faster, and benefits from economies of scale. A tightly knit network of trains would beat a transport system made of autonomous cars.
I did some napkin math on this a while back[1]. It's interesting.
I think people will still want their own personal cars, because...
> some of the good parts of trains and buses, and some of the good parts of Taxis
...they won't want to get the car with the drunk vomit urine and heavily graffitied and torn up interior.
I can see how you could - via the hailing app or whatnot - send the car off as "undesired because XYZ" - and maybe it would go somewhere to get refurbed, but after a while, with so many refurbs, the companies will either give up, or they will make concessions (allowing for so much damage until it is deemed "needing repair" and cleaning it up as best as they can otherwise).
People might also want personal cars as a quicker convenience, and also as a status symbol. There's also those who might want to ride around in a personalized custom car, much like people do today.
I'm not making a case people won't have their own cars, I just think it will be less common, and extremely less common to have two or more for a family.
> ..they won't want to get the car with the drunk vomit urine and heavily graffitied and torn up interior.
It's not like you don't know who was in the car that caused the problem, and can't have the whole day recorded for proof. Charge a cleanup fee, include video as proof. If it requires immediate cleaning and must be pulled off the road, charge them for the average income for that time as well. If it's in the agreement for the ride, you can auto charge the account/card as well, since that's how they paid in the first place.
I think that's plenty of incentive to cut down on people not treating your vehicles well because there's no driver to call them out.
> People might also want personal cars as a quicker convenience, and also as a status symbol.
Sure. For the same reason people buy $100k+ cars. That's a somewhat small segment of the market.
> There's also those who might want to ride around in a personalized custom car, much like people do today.
Insurance will likely start to make that expensive. Sure, it will happen, but I think it will be less common. It's already an expensive hobby.
This is a "America v/s Europe" problem.
If you design suburbs so that houses are clustered around Train Stations, then trains are a huge asset.
If you design suburbs around the car, then no, it won't work.