I think it is extremely likely that hailing and renting a self driving will be much, much cheaper than owning, maintaining and insuring your own vehicle.

I have many friends who buy cars from the $500-$1000 range and then drive them for a few years, fixing everything themselves using replacement parts. The cars are usually 15-20 years old. The insurance is $100-$200 a year. If they drive daily,do you think anyone will rent them a brand new, technology packed car for what is effectively $20 a month? HN lives in this bubble when everyone can afford a new car, or at least a lease on a car, but if you move slightly out of the 1st world countries(and by that I mean good countries with free healthcare, free education, but still with developing economies), you will find that for a lot of people $200 is half of their monthly salary. And yet those people drive their cars too. They don't live in poverty by any means, it's just that the standard of living is different than in the West.

>do you think anyone will rent them a brand new, technology packed car for what is effectively $20 a month?

Self driving cars won't always be new though. The price of the technology will drop rapidly as they become mass produced. And there will always an economic advantage to renting vs owning. The cost of the car is effectively divided over several people instead of one.

Except it will never be cheaper than public transportation. If public transportation is available, they will take public transportation. If public transportation is not available, neither will be driverless taxis.

That could be true... assuming that the government is able to adopt innovations and cost saving measures across all of their public transit systems fast enough to keep up with price drops from private industry.

I suspect that will not be the case. While public transportation may catch up on price (if the political will exists to push it there), I do think there will be a period of time where hailing a self driving car will be cheaper than some or most public transit options.

Will there be a difference between a self driving 1-5 person machine and a self driving 5-1000 person machine?

A robotaxi can take you to the local robobus hub, which drives you to the local robotrain point, whereupon a Just In Time (un)scheduled train will leave, as all journeys can be coordinated.

I can't imagine that there won't be strong efforts made by any entrants into the individual autocar market not to hinder the penetration of new public transit systems, and to hobble existing systems.

Why not? If driverless taxis are cheap enough, even a small town or rural area could have some. Wheras public transportation is available only in very large cities.

I imagine buses would be much cheaper and more prevalent when you don't have to pay for a driver.

I don't think having to pay for a human bus driver is the primary obstacle preventing us from having cheap and efficient public transportation.

Source: Most of Europe.

The issues with public transports are the same as with biking in the US: It works better when cities are really dense. Suburbs destroy the efficiency of public transport, biking, walking, inline skating, and any other non-car transportation.

Europe is very different from the US. People will drive 1-2 hours to get to work, which is not really done as much in Europe.

It's a myth that poor people drive. They depend on biking, walking, bumming rides from their friends and relatives, and public transportation.

I'd be interested to see statistics from more rural areas where there isn't any robust (or, in some cases, any) public transit. In urban areas, where living without a car is a possibility, I don't doubt that the low income population doesn't drive. In more rural areas I suspect it's the opposite.

Public transportation is not cheap and/or available in many places in the world. Look at all the cheap beater cars (even in the US), those aren't going driverless anytime soon.

Your can downvote me for days but that won't make your statements correct. In the 2000 Bay Area Travel Survey, driving was a minority share of trips for people in the bottom income quintile. Walking, biking, transit, riding as passengers in cars, and "other" are 50% more popular than driving.

Jokes on you. My account cannot downvote people yet.

See, that's the thing with Hacker News. A lot of people here think Silicon Valley is the center of the world and everywhere is just like us, when the fact, we are living in a little bubble and a lot of the US operates very differently.

It doesn't matter how big the empty part of the United States is. The Bay Area is as populous as Sweden and therefore big enough to do things its own way. It may in fact be true that the poor person in Pecos County, Texas, drives around in his own car, it is also an irrelevant fact on a population-weighted basis.

So when you said "It's a myth that poor people drive."

You really mean "It's a myth that poor people drive in heavily populated cities.", in that case, you would be correct lol.

This is getting downvoted because it sounds pretty flippant from a US point of view, but it's actually perfectly accurate for most of the world. In much of Africa, you're middle class if you have a bicycle, and only the rich own cars. Motorcycles are wildly popular in much of Asia for the same reason: they're a lot more affordable than cars, not just to own but to operate as well.