In my experience, people who want to have access to economical transport without sinking money into depreciating assets take a bus. If they have to have a car and don't have money to buy a new/almost new car, they buy a car that's 10 years old and drive that. I think people who own a car now won't be tempted to switch to a small non-personal-space vehicle even if it's much cheaper - if they cared about cheaper transport, there were already other options available, and they didn't pick them. They drive cars because they need them. And if those people who now use public transport decide to take cheap self driving pods, then the traffic problem gets worse, not better.

Public transportation is a poor replacement for a car in many places and a 10 year old car raises reliability issues with many people who are afraid to have a problem while driving.

And while people sometimes appreciate a lot of space in a car, most often, when they commute , they might not need that.

> a 10 year old car raises reliability issues with many people who are afraid to have a problem while driving.

In ~15 years of car ownership, I have never owned a car less than 10 years old, and I don't understand this at all. Currently I drive a 2002 Peugeot 307. Regular maintenance costs me less per year than the depreciation cost alone on a new car, and I've never had a breakdown that's left me stranded. Not once.

You are lucky. And that is neither here nor there anyway, because even owners of new cars can get breakdowns that require a tow.

Well, lucky or just taking good care of my vehicles..

But anyway, my point is exactly what you say: the risk of having a breakdown is small enough for any well-maintained car that it's pretty independent of car age.

I think most people who have 'bad luck' with cars tend not to maintain them very well. I think that this is probably even reflected in car reliability statistics; there are models of cars (e.g. Ford Crown Victorias) which have very good reliability records when in vehicle fleets, where they receive regular preventative maintenance, but much more mixed results when in private ownership, where my sense is that they tend to be owned by people with a more relaxed attitude towards good PM.

I have always been surprised that car manufacturers haven't done a better job of rolling regular maintenance expenses into the initial cost of a car (and thus, into the financing arrangements that support most new-car purchases), because doing so would appear to be something of a win-win: a more reliable car for the consumer and also a more reliable-seeming car for the manufacturer to tout. But I think the mandated separation of auto manufacturers from retailers and servicers in the US tends to conspire against this.

"In my experience, people who want to have access to economical transport without sinking money into depreciating assets take a bus"

Our experiences differ. In my own, they own a car. They just wind up impoverished as a result.

The only exception is in places with good public transport and cycling/walking infrastructure in human-scale development, but those places tend to be pretty pricey.