I think they're caught flat footed because here we are a decade later and the consumer's opinion still matters.
Most people are traveling during rush hour - there isn't much opportunity to share cars with them, and where there is it means cars traveling empty from the city to the suburbs in the morning. (and the opposite at 5pm).
When you own your own car you can "leave your golf clubs in the trunk in case a chance to play a round happens in the middle of the day". You can run errands over lunch. You store other things in the car that you don't need everyday. None of these are a big deal (many people take transit and thus cannot do that), but it is enough that when the economics are not a clear win you will want to own a car.
I do think autonomous delivery services will be the more important use case. I expect people without personal vehicles to use delivery services much more ubiquitously, and will end up travelling themselves personally much less.
There will likely be a period where some of these commuters will actually loan out their vehicle for taxiing people or products for people while they work. I just imagine eventually we'd see stripped down for product delivery only vehicles, removing a lot of the demand for personal loaning.
The golf club problem is real, but I think we'll eventually find a way to solve it independently because the wastes associated with an ever growing percentage of the population owning a personal vehicle will eventually cross a tipping point.
Except that they would still spend most of their time parked. Almost nobody is driving at 3am - they will nearly all be parked every night. There are vastly more cars needed during rush hour than mid day, and then there is a smaller peak at lunch time. Most cars will still be parked 95% of the time as we don't need them that often.
> If instead they rarely parked we could have far fewer of them,
At the expense of putting even more of them on the road unoccupied going to their next pickup. Or a parking spot in a cheap area: pay less for parking is a motivation though I expect even self owned cars will do that. This is an environmental disaster - unless you have a 100% renewable power source.
> have better saturation of modern safety features into the vehicle pool (since they'd wear out at a more uniform rate), and have better incentive alignment re: maintenance
People whoes self image is wrapped up in a new car will not put up with older cars. People who want cheap will ask for older cars. As such I expect either the taxi will have different categories of costs, or more likely they will sell their used cars (with 30k miles) to someone else - if this actually develops, which again I mostly expect it won't (but it might in some areas where we will see these patterns).
> because the wastes associated with an ever growing percentage of the population owning a personal vehicle will eventually cross a tipping point.
If that is your concern you should be asking for good public transportation. In places where it is good a lot of people don't own cars. I wouldn't be surprised if you have never been to such a place (people who live in such places are rarely native English speakers, though is a common English second language for some) Still that is a much better focus on your efforts - we have the technology today, is scales much better than cars ever can, and is cheaper!
I will bet that none of the engineers on the automation team over the age of 35 thought that. Only the young & naive or non-technical people would have believed that.