> Elon has said many times that rather than make a cheap electric car, he thinks it will make more sense to make a mid-price car that can do self-driving to earn the owner money during off-driving hours that the owner can then use to offset the cost of ownership of a Tesla.

What Elon is really saying is that the early adopters are subsidizing development of fleet vehicles that aren’t aimed for significant individual ownership.

Owning a personal vehicle and renting out it's idle time is a big maintenance and liability commitment which inherentlt reduces the reliable access that is the whole reason for ownership.

Specialized rental operations will be able to optimize handling the liability and maintenance overhead. Individual owners will be better of not owning and doing on-demand rental of self-driving vehicles than renting them out, because specialized rental orgs will drive the rental price down to where non-specialists won't be able to make a profit with the maintenance and liability costs imposed.