Those might be considerations for you. For many others, they'll love their car out earning revenue when they don't need it, and plenty of people who want door-to-door clean transportation without having to wait at a bus stop and without having to own a car.

Much like car sharing today, you'll have the option to keep the car at a remote trailhead or whatever, so it will be there in 2 hours. You'll just have to continue paying for it. Otherwise, you can end your ride and take your chances that it will still be there when you get back. In areas outside the "home" area, you'll have no choice but to keep paying since you can't "return" the car there.

People that live in cities, where this is most likely to catch on earlier, already can't leave anything in their cars unless they want to come back to a smashed window.

> People that live in cities, where this is most likely to catch on earlier

in cities where the public transport sucks, you mean? I just don't understand who would ever want to use a car inside Paris or Amsterdam, for instance.

The wait for an Uber is typically much smaller than the walk to the transit station + wait there (I don't think I've ever waited 20 min), you aren't restricted to one bag, and there is no schedule. The wait would get even smaller if there were 10x as many cars participating on that platform.

Car sharing is inconvenient because you first have to get to the station. Public transport often doesn't take you where you actually need to go, you're stuck to a schedule, you can't transport anything big, and it's often slower than a car. Cheap robotaxis fix that.

More importantly, I think many people have a car because there are some trips that just aren't realistically feasible without, and then they use the car because they already have it, have paid the fixed cost, and it's marginally better than public transport. With cheap robotaxis, they might use public transport for 90% of the trips because now they don't have to choose between owning a car and being unable to do those remaining 10% of trips.

I guess it depends a lot on the quality of your public transport.

Where I come from (not the US), in cities you have a bus/tram/metro every 5-10 minutes, bringing you everywhere, for a fraction of the cost of an Uber (which is why nobody uses Uber).

Places that don't have good public transport are quite remote, usually there are no Uber there, and if there is a taxi service it is quite far away so you have to wait and it's expensive.

Finally, moving one person at a time in a big heavy vehicle is less energy-efficient than having them in public transport (or better: taking the bike!). So public transport + bike again wins there, I think.

But again, it depends on the quality of your public service.

If a couple percent of cars were in this kind of system, they'd be waiting all over. It would be much less than 20 minutes. They could even set up equivalent "stations" where there's almost always a car parked within a couple blocks and it can get there before you do.

I don't go on a lot of long-term trips, but if I did that would still be a reason to get one car for a household instead of multiple. For rarer trips I would be happy to have a rental drive itself to my house.

If you mean day trips, then none of those issues are notable with a competent self-driving fleet except "one bag", but I don't think I've ever needed more than one bag for a day trip...

Really it sounds like you describe an efficient public transport system :). Of course not every city has that (I hear public transport kind of sucks in the US), but still it's important to know that other countries have that, without autonomous cars.

You'd have to run a bus every three minutes to get the same speed of pickup at stations.

But also those busses wouldn't be able to come to your door, or drop you off directly at your destination.

So I don't think I'm describing efficient public transport. I'm describing something like the platonic ideal of taxis in a dense city, but without the huge number of drivers.

I would say that metros in Paris are much, much closer to 3min than to 20 (20 sounds like the middle of the night).

But now imagine if every passenger instead took an individual car? That would require a lot of cars.

Yes, an individual car is more comfortable if you can afford it and if not too many people have one (otherwise you need big big roads to avoid traffic jams). But really my ideal is closer to metros/trams than taxis.

If you bring out metros, you can get to those numbers, but now you're at a tiny number of places, and most cities just aren't dense enough for that even if they're going for great public transit.

> otherwise you need big big roads to avoid traffic jams

Right, that's the main downside, but there's a lot of areas where they'd fit.

I think trams and buses work well, too. Of course buses are getting closer to autonomous taxis, but it still feels more efficient to share a bus than to have one person per taxi :).

Then of course they can be used together. In my city there is a system of rental cars that you leave at different stops: you have a card and can just take the car if it's there. The car doesn't come to you, but still it's a pretty good solution I think.

Anyway, autonomous cars have to get reliable before they can actually be used with public transports, I guess.