The whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.
Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS services so far.
Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Yeah, this would rely on robust competition.
And with just 6 people the overhead if an imperfect route and additional stops will be measured in minutes.
And of course, it's pretty easy to imagine an option to pay a bit more for a fully personal route.
For example, in Seattle I can get a shared airport shuttle for $40 with the pick-up/drop-off at my front door. And this is a fully private ADA-compliant commercial service, with a healthy profit margin, not a rideshare that offloads vehicle costs onto the driver. And a self-driving van can be even cheaper than that, since it doesn't need a driver.
Meanwhile, transit also costs around $40 per trip and takes at least 1 hour more. And before you tell me: "no way, the transit ticket is only $2.5", the TRUE cost of a transit ride in Seattle is more than $20. It's just that we're subsidizing most of it.
So you can see why transit unions are worrying about self-driving. It'll kill transit completely.
The _only_ issue with the old "microtransit" is the _driver_. Each van ends up needing on average MORE drivers than it moves passengers. It does solve the problem of throughput, though.
But once the driver is removed, this problem flips on its head. Each regular bus needs around 4 drivers for decent coverage. It's OK-ish only when the average bus load is at least 15-20 people. It's still much more expensive and polluting than cars, but not crazily so.
self driving changes some things, but there are a lot of other points in the many article linked from there that don't change.
Can you guess why?
Hint: think about the intervals between buses and how you should represent them to stay truthful. And that buses necessarily move slower than cars. And that passengers will waste some time due to non-optimal routes and transfers. And that passengers will waste some time because they need to walk to the station.
So back to my point, can you tell me EXACTLY what I should read in that article? Point out the paragraph, please.
Even better — charge 10% less and corner the market! As long as nobody charges 10% less than you…
If all of those people switch to cars, you end up with it taking an hour to travel 1 mile by car.
It's almost as if they have busses for a reason.
But anyway, your statement is actually not true anywhere in the US except NYC. Even in Chicago, removing ALL the local transit and switching to 6-seater minivans will eliminate all the traffic issues.
Large stadium arenas are a special case, but they don't create sustained traffic, and their usage periods typically do not overlap with the regular rush hour.
If you remove the jobs and housing, traffic does get a lot better. But it's not much of a city without jobs and housing.
The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.
Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.
Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.
Efficient for who, is the problem
Maybe for you, I already don't own it and have not found that to be true. I pretty much order an uber whenever I don't feel like riding my bike or the bus, and that costs <$300 most months. Less than the average used car payment in the US before you even consider insurance, fuel, storage, maintenance, etc.
I also rent a car now and then for weekend trips, that also is a few hundred bucks at most.
I would be surprised if robotaxis were more expensive long term.
For the rest - many of them live in a place where not enough others will follow the same system and so they will be forced to own a car just like today. If you live in a not dense area but still manage to walk/bike almost everywhere (as I do), renting a car is on paper cheaper the few times when you need a car - but in practice you don't know about that need several weeks in advance and so they don't have one they can rent to you. Even if you know you will need the car weeks in advance, sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.
If you live in a very dense area such that you almost regularly use transit (but sometimes walk, bike), but need a car for something a few times per year, then not owning a car makes sense. In this case the density means shared cars can be a viable business model despite not being used very much.
In short what you say sound insightful, but reality of how cars are used means it won't happen for most car owners.
Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.
Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.
Hertz will hurts you.
Subscription for self driving will almost be a given with so many bad actors in tech nowadays, but never even being allowed to own the car is even worse.
And what do you even mean by subscription to changes to the law?
Law - when a government changes the driving laws. Government can be federal (I have driven to both Canada and Mexico. Getting to Argentina is possible though I don't think it has ever been safe. Likewise it is possible to drive over the North Pole to Europe), state (or whatever the country calls their equivalent). When a city changes the law they put up signs, but if a state passes a law I'm expected to know even if I have never driven in that state before. Right turn on red laws are the only ones I can think of where states are different - but they are likely others.
Laws also cover new traffic control systems that may not have been in the original program. If the self driving system can't figure out the next one (think roundabout) then it needs to be updated.
This is about a self-driving car you own.