> So you'd be willing to rent out your $50,000 car to complete strangers without even being there to act as a social deterrent to them making a huge fucking mess of it.

Totally. I've even allocated investment capital for the sole purpose of putting a few Teslas into service as full time taxis on the Tesla Network.

I let people into my rental properties, why not other investment assets?

> I let people into my rental properties, why not other investment assets?

Because monthly rent is big, and leases are usually longer than a month. A Tesla Taxi is more like a motel room with hourly rates.

> A Tesla Taxi is more like a motel room with hourly rates.

So, more like AirBNB than a leased rental agreement?

Yes. Or more like renting out your bed while you're not sleeping in it.

So like Airbnb.

Different people have different boundaries and I respect that. I have no problem with renting my room/house out while I'm away, and I'd have no problem with renting my car out without me in it.

Investment income is investment income.

> Public infrastructure experiences a lot of vandalism and abuse. Prepare for your car to be treated like public infrastructure.

Prepare for your car to have interior cameras and a load of other sensors (e.g. smoke detector) constantly streaming to "the cloud." Of course, there will be no way to turn them off, because then passengers would do that. Then you just bill the passenger for the damages, and send him a link to the incriminating footage.

Then again, I would hate to use my personal car as a taxi, or my spare bedroom as a hotel, so I'm clearly not a good candidate for the "sharing" economy. Maybe I'm not desperate enough.

It's like air b&b, you build the cost of wear and tear and maintenance into your pricing. As others said, a modern vehicle will have cameras and the ability to lock it's doors and drive someone to a police station. You also have a car like the Tesla Model X which has a separate compartment in the back, so the customers will be isolated from the driving area.

  "and the ability to lock it's doors and drive someone to a police station"

That's unlikely, without a change in the law. Some modern cars do allow the doors to be locked remotely, but they don't prevent the doors from being unlocked from inside. Nor could I imagine an autonomous vehicle not stopping (for safety) when a door opened.

I imagine that being able to identify the person renting the car, and cameras to show their actions, would be deterrence for most. For the rest, there's insurance.

A metro car can't lock its doors and drive to the nearest police station. That should give enough deterrence.

So we're giving self-driving cars arrest powers now? Will they have automated restraints in case the passenger decides they want to try to break out?