Why is it transformative? Especially in cities. You have Ubers/taxis/private cars/etc. today. So you hypothetically cut the costs (maybe) in half of hailing a ride. Which is speculative. Does that really transform your use of transportation? I doubt it would change my use of cars one bit.

There are tipping points. If always taking the taxi everywhere is more expensive than the cost of owning your own car, then most people drive their own cars and taxis are for special occasions. If after a tech change always taking the taxi everywhere is less expensive than the cost of owning your own car, then most people would do just that, and only a minority would own a car.

A switch from 20/80 to 80/20 is transformative, changes the default attitude and has further societal effects.

> has further societal effects

Like parking or more specifically - not parking. Here's an example development: "And parking clocks in at a full 29% of the developed land here, taking up twice as much total space as the actual buildings."

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/6/movie-set-urban...

Parking may be reduced but the flip side is that we will have hoards of always cicuclating cyber cabs or we’ll have private owners returning and summoning their private vehicle from free parking at home, thus doubling the trips taken

Not to mention sending a car out for errands. Self driving will free up parking garages, but fill up the roads.

Uber has no relevance once level 5 exists. Vehicle manufacturers will run the vehicles directly if there is any profit to be made from a taxi service.

I doubt it. Vertical integration only works so far.

I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company. This is, and will remain a race to the bottom because competition is fierce: people buy price and first to get to them.

They will also sell cars to normal people. Most people don't think about how convenient it is to have the storage of their personal car. If parking is free or cheap (which is it in the suburbs) having your golf clubs in the trunk or a spare diaper in the glove box are worth the little extra cost, not to mention your car is always there so no need to wait for the taxi to in busy times.

Of course there is also the city, but if you live in a city self driving cars still suffer from congestion and so public mass transit still has big advantages. In fact because the self driving taxi is spending time empty waiting for the next rider it adds to the problem meaning for even more people public transit is worth the hassles with it (which in turn means more demand to make transit better)

> I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company.

A self-driving car is software and hardware... you can sell hardware but software only gets licensed. Software is really where the value is, and that won’t be owned by anyone but the company that made it.

Look at the history of mobile phones, which were originally sold to consumers only by the carriers. As the phones got better and better software, the business model attached more and more to the manufacturer.

Congestion problems are dramatically alleviated if you can convert your city over to self driving only. Once the cars can drive in platoons they are packed in tight, no more accordion effect.

On the way something like UberPool would be needed. Or the taxi can just drive me to the nearest train station and I can take mass transit into the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platoon_(automobile)

Platoons help, but there is only so much space on the roads. In short even allowed 5 times as many cars won't put New York subways out of business. Environmentalists will still want to put everybody on the bus (pick any mass transit technology) even in smaller cities.

> Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish.

I doubt it. One of the biggest obstacles you have is families and the need for infant car and child booster seats. Car ownership is here to stay for a while.

What's the problem with families? My local Uber-equivalent will have and provide child booster seats if requested (as did many but not all "pre-app" taxi service providers), and for infants there are also a bunch of solutions depending on their age; one of them (perhaps not the best, just anecdotal example) is the combo carriage+car seat, where I can put the "carriage wheels" in the trunk and put the baby in the car safely without even waking them up, crucially, it can be done in any car or taxi, and I've taken taxi rides with a baby this way.

It does require some planning (and some support from the service providers) but it's definitely a solvable issue, if the people would want to do that, then it can be arranged.

I suspect that most of the people ready to ditch car ownership don't actually use cars much. In addition to the families/kids gear, a lot of people I know have their cars/trucks setup for various types of outdoor activities such as carrying canoes.

How likely is Uber to kit their entire fleet out with snow tires in winter? That’s an easy example of something a lot of private owners do for safety during the winter. I did that so I could drive to snowed-in trailheads. What about chaining up? And how will the self-driving cab handle getting stuck in the snow? Will there be sand available?

Even without doing any real off-roading, it's one of the things I always feel a bit uncomfortable with when I take rentals to relatively remote areas out West. If it were my own vehicle I'd carry a lot more gear to handle potential problems than I realistically can carry on a plane and throw in a rental.

> Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish.

As a passenger, there is no difference to me whether my car/bus/train is self-driving or not. As long as I'm not driving, it doesn't matter if a meat, or a silicon neural network operates it.

Given the above, how does this make self-driving a transformative technology?