Or you can have it do useful tasks. Have a car fleet that's passenger-only during peak times, but couriers packages/freight during its downtime.

This is an excellent point. 95% idle rate of vehicle fleet is a huge opportunity frontier for businesses. Whoever figures out how to capitalize most on this is going to win big. I don't think it's an accident that Uber has been experimenting with hauling other kinds of things in its cars.

I think it's possible we may see a time when most vehicles stay in the network, and rarely need to sit idle. That would be ideal certainly!

Yep. The goal being to reduce that 15% to something like 2-3%.

I wouldn't be surprised if car ownership becomes 0% by the time my kids grow up. Cars will essentially become like trains - owned and operated by companies trying to make a profit. You just pay for the ride or get a monthly pass.

> I wouldn't be surprised if car ownership becomes 0% by the time my kids grow up. Cars will essentially become like trains - owned and operated by companies trying to make a profit. You just pay for the ride or get a monthly pass.

We can only hope so. Think how much people work for a resource that sits idle 95% of the time. New vehicle sales this year are at ~17 million units a year, with the average price being ~$35K/USD/year. That's $595 billion/year being spent on something sitting around most of the time. Just think about how much less work people would have to do if they didn't need to own a car.

The down side is that not only is all of your data on your movements tracked, but it is also being sold to others, including the government. Another nail in privacy's coffin.

Anonymous vehicular travel is dead or soon-to-be-dead anyway. Police are routinely using license plate scanners for parking enforcement and for checking vehicle alert status. Toll facilities are using license plate scanning to bill you for congestion fees. Smart phone apps report your whereabouts sometimes by choice, sometimes not.

This isn't to say that pervasive tracking of individuals' whereabouts isn't a problem. I just think that self-driving cars aren't going to make the situation any worse than it is / will already be (exact timing is modulo your present jurisdiction).