You can presumably still keep your own car even if everyone else is renting one for each single trip. It won't make sense financially, but it won't be more expensive than today. It will be more clearly a leisure expense, as in, you'll know which part is your transportation cost and which part is the extra you choose to pay for keeping your junk and having the filth be your own. Who knows, it may be a fairly popular alternative. I certainly value those things, just not enough to pay thousands of dollars extra for them.

The car as a service option won't be the solution for most families, because they have a lot of nonhuman cargo they need to store in their car: strollers, diaper bags, sporting equipment, etc.

Parents already unload and load the stroller and diaper bag at their destination, what's the big deal about doing it at the origin?

Some people will pay extra for car storage, other people will opt for the discount of not owning a car.

Think about all the transitions of "stuff" that an average family with 2 kids will need. Maybe one of those kids is a toddler, maybe another one is a little older and plays baseball. Somehow you gotta pick up the toddler from day care after work (diaper bag, maybe a stroller, car seat), and the older kid from school (books, projects, instruments) and get the older kid to baseball practice (bat, glove, maybe a couple balls). Plus you have your own stuff, maybe a laptop bag. You've gotta transition all this stuff all over the place without ever leaving anything in a car? You're gonna carry your laptop bag, your kid's school stuff, and all the toddler equipment to baseball practice? God forbid you have to do some grocery shopping on the way home after baseball practice. That sounds like a nightmare.

I agree that families with small children have a need for car-as-storage, but that passes after a couple years (per child). I'm not so sure about sports. For hardcore athletes, then yeah. But for your weekly biking or skiing or surfing trip, the equipment can be hauled on and off larger car-as-service's hired for the purpose. The rest of the time, store the equipment in a fraction of the space you would use to store a car with the equipment in.

Disclaimer: I was never a regular in any big-equipment sports.

If I'm wrong, well, like I said owning a car might still be fairly popular when they self-drive.

Any sport that requires an external rack for equipment like bikes, kayaks, or skis is a major hassle with rental vehicles. Sure some rental agencies already offer vehicles with racks but dealing with all the various options and configurations becomes a huge problem for logistics and inventory management. So they often don't have what you want when you actually need it. I'll keep my personally owned vehicles regardless of cost.

With regards to sporting equipment I was specifically thinking about baseball, but football and hockey can also tend to have lots of equipment.

> Another option is to have the car drive out into the suburbs in search of free parking to abuse.

This doesn't sound like abuse, it sounds like a good idea.

The point of expensive parking is to reduce the contention for parking spaces. If the car drives a long way away to park where parking is less contested, that seems like a win.

It's abuse because in suburbs the parking is provided at the expense of the property owner, intended for the benefit of those using the property.

Neither I nor Walmart would be pleased to have empty cars showing up to park on our property.

Maybe we're thinking of different things.

I had in mind just the side of a road that doesn't have parking restrictions. Anybody is allowed to park there.

Perhaps you are talking about a free car park outside a supermarket or similar? In which case, yeah, fair enough, that would be abusing the free parking.

It's still an issue for the road owner, which will generally be a town. The town pays for that road surface, with the expectation that it will be mostly used by those with some other purpose for being in the town.

It's a bit like the complaints about Waze sending cars down minor little suburban streets. The town hadn't intended to be paying for the transportation infrastructure of a nearby major city.