If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".
Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.
For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude.
It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.
Or maybe surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to buy their own cars. If the advantage of a car-sharing scheme is cost savings, and then you start charging more, what's the advantage again?
In any case, I don't think that that's a feasible option for the majority of jobs.
Charging more than the cheaper default. Doubt it will be as much as the depreciation, registration, insurance and servicing of a car.
Right now, my wife and I have two cars. One of them is only used 2-3 days of the week. The other is only used for a small portion of each day.
If taxis weren't needing to cover wage costs, I'd already be better off switching from the second car to using a taxi to get to and from work. Registration, insurance and servicing for the second car is $2-3k/year.
I don't think that insurance is a good cost to include in the comparison. In a driverless car world, we imagine that insurance costs will be pretty much a constant per mile traveled -- there are no better or worse drivers -- and probably lower than they are now. And you'll have to pay for them (directly or indirectly) whether you rent or own.
If your costs for the second car are more than $1k in just registration and servicing are more than about $500 a year, that, first, suggests that you're not very cost-conscious today. My car's cost service and registration fees are much less than that. Second, service costs also are basically a per-mile fee -- your car's quality doesn't degrade when it sits in your garage, and you'll pay the service costs of a vehicle you use directly or otherwise.
You didn't mention fuel, but of course again that's essentially per-mile, and costs what it costs regardless of the car ownership model.
That leaves registration, which is a small cost, but would be shared in a shared ownership model.
Now, of course, the actual major expense is the cost of buying the car in the first place, defrayed over the lifetime of the car, minus any price you get for selling it. The big advantage of a car-share service would be that you could share that cost with others. If a driverless car costs $50,000 (and we have no idea how much they would cost), and you use it for only 5 years, then sell it for $20,000, you get $6k per year. In a shared ownership model where you share it with three other people, and the company that you're going through makes about 10% gross margin, you're looking at $2.2k instead of $6k, so yay, savings of $3.8k per year. That's a lot of money.
If, on the other hand, a driverless car costs $30k and can be sold after five years for $15k, then it's $3k per year to own and $1.1k per year to rent, you're saving $1.9k instead $3.8k, and that's still not peanuts, but you suggest that right now you spend more than that for a not-very-highly-used second car. The advantages of owning are considerable.
Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour.
You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.
