That doesn't mean I agree with the GP's point about it lowering car usage overall. The reduced cost of auto taxies also pushes against your reluctance to take one, though perhaps not all the way to "use my car whenever I leave the house" levels. I also think that once people begin replacing their cars with autonomous taxis, they'll sign up for all kinds of taxi subscriptions that will further reduce that reluctance. After all, driving your car now isn't completely free: it still costs you gas money, plus the hassle of actually driving it. And other forms of transportation aren't free either. So the bar here isn't 0.
I see this all the time and I just do not believe it is true. Uber/Lyft/etc undercut taxis for users to take market share, and have drastically raised prices to become marginally profitable.
Autonomous cars are more expensive, and the labor in non-autonomous cars is not the majority of the costs. In NYC, a 1hr Uber could easily cost $100 against a minimum wage of $15.
The idea that a taxi trip becoming cheaper than a car owners marginal car trip would require dramatic dropping of taxi prices. Even halving is not really going to do it, and I don't think removing the driver even halves the costs.
The autonomous taxi boosters also seem to overlook what happens to unattended, unmonitored public infrastructure in urban areas of this country. The reason I stopped using Zipcar in NYC was because they were typically trashed inside by the previous drivers. Now imagine an autonomous taxi that gets turned over 10x as often. Good luck.
Cost. The cost of an Uber is way too much for daily travel (vs owning your own car or public transport).
A human-driven taxi needs to pay the driver's salary within an 8 hour shift. An autonomous taxi can run (almost) 24/7, 365 days a year. Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?
Another scenario is someone simply renting out their own car as an autonomous taxi whenever they aren't using it themselves (which is most of the time). Then it'll always be cheaper than current-day taxis because it's just a low-effort bonus source of income to the car owner.
And, for a car driven any reasonable amount, most of the cost is in the mileage.
Neither, any savings will trickle up to the investors. The price of robotaxis is going to be just below the limit where it would make sense to own a car.
I think most people will try the taxi, but if you already own a car (that is transit doesn't make sense for most trips) you will discover it isn't much cheaper than owning your own car, and your own car is waiting outside when you want to go (one big advantage of owning a car over transit is the car is ready when you want to go instead of having to call or hope one is waiting - if cars need to wait outside your office all day in case your kid gets sick that increases costs). Instead you can just buy a self driving car and then leave your things in the car if you go shopping over lunch - something you cannot do with a shared car.
In reality, I don't think it is useful to try to enumerate these small immediate changes that are distinct from the availability of taxis. The long term cultural shift of having autonomous vehicles may lead people to fundamentally share vehicles in a different way. This may lead to a situation where fewer vehicles are driving more miles.
Only if it is always picking the same people up. Otherwise this is a big negative. People often need to arrive someplace on time. If my car had decided to take a detour to pick someone else up and made me late for my early meeting I'd be mad. Car pools work - to the extent they do - because it is always the same people who need to arrive at the same time.
And the cars and autonomous driving software itself is becoming more expensive and more subscription-based over time so those rents are going to have to be passed on to the consumer. Large autonomous taxi services may be able to strike better deals or even build their own software/vehicles if they're big enough, but you're not going to be able to compete with them effectively by purchasing a Tesla (and presumably consumer prices will rise as there's less individual-owned vehicles and companies go seeking after only the highest margins and abandon the toyota-corolla market to the robotaxi corporations).
If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.
You factor in intelligent ride sharing and you could halve the number of cars on the road most days.
So the leap here is based on "Autonomous taxi companies will charge less per ride than rideshare"?
perhaps.
The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car usage growth.
EDIT: Some specificity: How would robotaxis replace commuting for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The taxi has to move at least from the storage to the rider pickup to the rider dropoff. Without sharing, that's actually more miles and the same number of cars.
Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's more miles, fewer cars in existence (since both riders dont need a car), but the same number of car trips (plus the to/from storage).
With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven is just going up unless people change their lifestyle. That doesn't do anything to curb care useage.