The fixed costs of owning a car are expensive, but typical city/suburban usage ignoring work commute easily makes the costs worth it. The time expense of using public transit or the dollar expense of relying on lyft/uber are simply too high.
Self driving cars have some advantages:
They reduce the cost of sporadic non-peak usage. For some this will make the work commute on public transit a dollars+time net savings. This pressure will be especially high on 2+ car households, where the economics of a second car will be abysmal.
Self driving cars can act as a much more efficient feeder to public transit. At any given time, especially during peak usage, there are a bunch of people going from approximately where you are to approximately where you're going.
We aren't taking advantage of this today because of two problems: Coordination is hard and requires a critical mass. Any time stopped just kills average speed, greatly increasing time to get to a destination (this is why busses are soooo sloooow.)
Self driving cars can take people from their houses in suburban neighborhoods to coordination locations. Hop in a small bus/shuttle with a few others. Wait no more than a minute or two as cars arrive. Then the shuttle takes everyone to their destination (if it's a high density city where the destination is within a block), or the reverse of a feeder, where single person taxis are already there waiting to take you, with a pause as long as it takes to get out of a vehicle, walk a few feed, and get in another.
Public transport and bikes are not feasible in Houston or Los Angeles, due to low density and hostile roads.
Going back to your argument, I believe all of this would also be possible with cabs, from a user's perspective the only difference between an autonomous car and an Uber might be price (over the long term)
High speed rail between large agglomerations like SF/LA seem like obvious improvements,but seem impossible to build in the USA.
For many people a robot taxi is a viable alternative to car ownership, but for plenty of people owning a car is always going to be a better option.
> Why does the US need car ownership?
Cause freedom. You're talking about the U.S. Why does the US need gun ownership? Cause.
> wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
I hear this again and again and I wonder how detached from reality people are. There are many reasons this won't happen. People have different standards of cleanliness. People have different standards of how much scratches they tolerate on a car. People view cars as status symbols. The list goes on.
People buy condos even though a rental would financially make more sense. But they want to own something they can call theirs and do with it whatever they want or keep it pristine to their liking.
Is it other people detached from reality? It seems unrealistic to assume 100% of people will not want to use such a service.
> There are many reasons this won't happen.
The very fact taxis and Uber exist means there is a demand for such a service.
When I lived ~10 miles outside of a town, I would have been fine not having a car if I could reliably summon cheap transport. In a small town, all the same. The amount of waiting matters, but not that much.
Waymo and Uber seem to be of the opinion that car ownership is going to disappear which continues to boggle my mind. The US absolutely needs car ownership for anyone not living downtown in a city, which is over 50% of the US population. People shouldn't be looking at them as examples.