That goes away fast though. By the time you are a more seasoned parent you just need less stuff & the car seat issue is only for very early age kids. Booster seats are drop in.

> Now it's basically useless.

There's also this thing that even if you don't have kids (I personally don't) you don't want to sit on a car chair which has had other people's bodily fluids on it. Public transport like buses or trams is for the moment safe-ish when it comes to that, at least where I live, because not a lot of people masturbate in public or have sex on the chairs of a bus because people will call them out, but I don't see what would stop 2 people having sex in a car which they don't own (they only share it) and where nobody can see them.

There's also the non-politically correct question of what we should do with homeless people riding these vehicles? This is a real problem when it comes to public transport in my city, as the trams and buses are used as a de-facto day shelter against cold when winter comes. You really do not want to sit close to many of these homeless people in those cases, as the smell is very hard on the senses (I mean, real hard), often times you can tell a homeless people has been riding that tram half an hour ago only by the smell alone (even though he's not still on the tram). If said homeless people were to use this car-sharing thingie I can guarantee you that nobody else will use said cars after them.

There's also the thing of how do you protect these vehicles against destruction and negligence by its users, a problem encountered by many who have shared their car in the existing car-sharing projects.

There could still be a massive in the total number of individual cars, though. If you switched from the US average of 2 cars per household to one car for each child under the age of eleven, that would be a drop from 250 million individually owned cars to 50 million individually owned cars.

With the standardized latch system you can fit a car seat in about 2 minutes. The main issue is when you transition out of the clip-in car seat to the larger seat at around a year as you certainly wouldn't want to have to lug one of those around at the other end.

That said it's a solvable problem with some thought, engineering, and standardization, but you are correct in saying it won't be solved until ride sharing EV's are out of the early adopter stage/commuter stage.

This is a really big point I've never considered!

I don't have kids, so I'm definitely coming from a place of ignorance. On planes and trains I never see car seats used, which I assume is because crashes are so unlikely on those modes of transit.

If self driving cars are as safe as, or safer than, a trip on a train, would it still be a concern?

^ Parent w/ a <1 yr old. Car seats aren't used on planes because a car seat would take up a seat, which costs money. Kids under 2 yrs are free if they sit on your lap at most/all US airlines, so parents would just swap lap-sitting for their kid(s).

Not sure about trains.

I assume that if/when cars are as safe as a plane/train, adults wouldn't even need seat belts but you'd still need a carseat for an infant/toddler because it also stabilizes the child's position. Kids <6mo have no neck control. Kids <10mo can't reliably sit up for long durations. An autodriving car might be safe, but it'd probably still need to make emergency stops / turns. That'd be real bad if there were no carseats.

Car seats are now encouraged for planes for < 18 months. The worry isn't crashes per say but jerks and sudden stops on take off and landing, and turbulence.

https://www.faa.gov/passengers/fly_children/

It's a PITA to use due to the huge variety of seat dimensions and car seat sizes and no standardized latching system for plane seats.

Good point - I'd imagine that quickly becomes something you can request that the vehicle have. Maybe it'll take an extra 5 minutes to get to you as there are fewer but that might just be a bonus if you have a kid to get ready :D

Exactly. It will be a checkbox in the app and work much like cabs with disability access do now - just a subset of the larger fleet.

Just another checkbox on some sort of auto-deploying fleet management's app, maybe.

Actually a percentage of cars could have child seats and you have to inform while booking. In Singapore Grab already had the option of booking car with child seat.

Similar issues if you have a dog. The probability that you can take a dog in a taxi/uber/lyft is very low and you have to call ahead to ask and it makes it very inconvenient. Many families have dogs. At least in Canada/Europe public transit allows dogs much more than in the US so thats an improvement.