It does, however self driving taxis can be operated far cheaper than human driver taxis.

So if the cost of running your car is say $5000 a year and you can get an subscription robocar service for $100 a week then a large number of people will switch.

At the moment it's only cheaper to go car free if it's possible for you to walk/ride/catch public transport to work Mon-Fri and catch the occasional taxi when needed.

Robocar for $100 a week would be $5600 a year. So individual car would be still cheaper in such case... :) Unless you start factoring in time that you were away for vacation and didn't pay for that week etc. But that'd be some Adobe-level subscription madness...

Average owned car cost is $725/month according to the AAA[1].

[1] http://exchange.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Your-Driv...

Just pointed out a math flaw in parent post. It's obvious where both numbers were pulled from...

Many people would pay a premium not to have to pony up a down payment or deal with oil changes.

What percentage of population? 5%? In mean time, people buy used cars for the amount of down payment, if not less. And do oil changes themselves because it's cheaper.

There're already services that cater to those people. Full-service car leases, regular car sharing etc. People who want that already use them. But they don't seem to get that wide adoption. If shared autonomous cars would be adopted as widely, they wouldn't change traffic flow much.

Most people own cars. One the anticipated benefits of self-driving cars is that they can be shared rather than owned. If they are shared they can be constantly in use rather than parked and when parked do not need to be parked where they were last used.

Why are self-driving cars more easily or more likely shared than human-driven cars? Someone else pointed out that they cost less to operate, but I wonder how much will change. People like owning things, including nice cars.

The reason you and I can't share a human driven car right now is because I need it to drive to work and so do you. But I leave for work at 6:30am, usually, and you might leave at 8:30. We could share a self driving car that drops me off and then goes back to pick you up.

It becomes even easier with a bigger pool.

Also, it breaks the driver/car connection since you are no longer a driver.

Finally, the real reason. Without a cab driver to pay and tip, cabs are actually cheaper than ownership. This is Uber's end game.

A fleet of self driving cars equal to the maximum needed simultaneously can move around ferrying first one person then another to their destination.

Car ownership requires at worst 1 car per person.

Carpooling requires a lot of planning and only works for with individuals with similar scheduled routes and requires the humans to include the time to drop off additional passengers or pass control of the vehicle to another for additional legs of the trip. Totally aside from the logistical nightmare it requires people to trust others with an asset worth thousands or 10s of thousands of dollars.

Imagine you pick 10 people. Getting them all to and from work shopping etc requires 10 cars at worst in the ownership strategy.

Imagine that carpooling might reduce it to 8 or 9. Its extremely likely that a route could be plotted for 3-5 cars to take all to their desired destinations both by moving back and forth for trips that don't coincide and by making slightly longer trips that move multiple parties.

Now imagine that you have the entire population and can match all the rides that coincide and include an entire range of vehicles including buses to get everyone from A to B maybe you can reduce this to 1-2 per commuter.

> A fleet of self driving cars equal to the maximum needed simultaneously can move around ferrying first one person then another to their destination.

A fleet of taxis or cars from similar services could do the same. I don't see how the self-driving aspect changes the situation, other than possibly reducing cost by eliminating the driver.

Most people can't afford to commute via taxi and commuting by bus is hindered by routes that are geographically and temporally limited.

Self driving cars by displacing the driver may eventually be cheap and flexible enough to compete with ownership.

More than 50% of the cost of operating a taxi is the driver.