When you reach that stage of technology, why own a car at all ? By Ubering/Renting/Leasing into a fleet of autonomous cars, you get all of that with the addition of:

* Be able to chose the car for your immediate present needs (car/truck/sport)

* Have a car anywhere in the world

* Save money as you no longer need private parking space in your property.

Also most likely the cost of private car ownership is likely going to increase to the domain of luxury.

First because car manufacturer will want a piece of the fleet pie (see Volvo) and that will be a disputed market between Manufacturer/Uber-like/Rental Companies.

Then government are going to like fleets. Working with a few large partners is going to make stuff like dynamic traffic management doable, cities will be able to enforce very strict policies, and minimise the space allocated to car. For example in the EU they are destroying public parking space in the cities, do not allow building of private parking space either for offices or houses.

So car manufacturer won't want to sell you car and government won't want you to own one - good luck :-)

Eh, there are successful niche manufacturers now, I imagine there will always be someone willing to sell you your own vehicle for the indefinite future, at a price at least as low as today and probably lower.

All of those are independent of how the car is powered.

"powered" sure, but I was talking about the cars being relatively self-driving...

How many gas powered self driving cars are they making?

As far as I can tell, most of Waymo's fleet is gas-powered. They bought 62,000 hybrid minivans, and hybrids are gas-powered. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/31/w...

Exactly as many as EV cars: 0

It just seems like a car is the wrong form factor for all of these tasks. Or more importantly, doing all of theses task atomically using cars as the atoms is awfully inefficient and cumbersome. So much capital and physical resource goes into manufacturing cars, and to then use a lumbering metal cage to pick up groceries when transporting a human is no longer a requirement seems silly.

There is also the issue that car infrastructure dominating humans living spaces and running out of space has become an increasing issue and EV/vehicle automony only embeds the issue deeper into our societies practices. We should be finding ways to replace cars.

Disclaimer, I come from rural South Australia and would have found it very difficult to live without a car due to the long distances involved and complete lack of public transportation outside of the (only) city center. So I empathize with the rural need for cars. But the majority of people who would buy an autonomous EV are not going to be rural, and probably have better alternatives.

I like these ideas, but they call come at the cost of the availability of the car, and I don't know how often people will actually do them. Let's say you send your car off, and it does an errand for you and is due back at 11:30, so you can take it out for lunch at noon. Now the car gets stuck in traffic, or the weather turns bad, and the car can't return until 12:15. That's frustrating. Likewise, say you send it off to drive around until you need it at 5. However, everyone else is also doing that, and there's a huge traffic jam at the entrance to the financial district, and your car doesn't actually show up until 5:30, causing you to miss you dinner reservations.

I've owned an unreliable car, that didn't start every time, and it totally sucked.

You don't have to rely on just your car.

Think cattle, not pets.

Given those scenarios, it looks like traffic pricing, as currently used in Singapore, for example, would need to become much more widespread for the society to properly share road resource.

I believe that will be a reality for electric cars regardless of self driving features. Its the essential next step is allocating vehicle costs correctly. Right now gas taxes take care of some of the allocation, but that obviously wont work in the future.