[gmarx]

Imagine this future in Europe: pretty much no one owns a personal car. When you want to go somewhere you order a car on your phone and within 10 minutes a driverless car arrives and takes you to your detination. Your music plays through the sound system. The back seat is comfy and you have plenty of room to work or surf the internet. The trip could be to the hardware store, or hundreds of miles to visit family.

[potatolicious]

I feel like OP understands this - the questions is that why do any of that when the younger generation is rapidly urbanizing, in which case "order a car on your phone, wait 10 minutes" seems silly compared to "walk out front door, onto train, be at destination even sooner".

The self-driving utopia is primarily a suburban-centric dream, in many European cities (and a small handful of American ones) it's likely to be less efficient than what already exists.

Around here for example, the subway runs every 2-3 minutes and moves faster than cars - perhaps even self-driving ones. Trips are generally short enough that being able to work/surf the internet is a pretty marginal benefit, and the hardware store is so close that it would be nonsensical to use any vehicle to go there. All of the above pre-supposed long travel times and having to take a vehicle for even mundane every tasks - this is untrue for many cities, where cars (self-driving or otherwise) will likely be strictly inferior to the utility offered by walking or mass transit.

[monk_e_boy]

Where I live in the UK, I guess it is part rural and par urban (it's a bit of a sprawl.) Everyone owns cars. Buses run, but your journey is going to take a very long time. Last time I checked to get to the nearest city took over an hour on the bus and 15 minutes by car.

[WalterSear]

City subways systems take decades to build. Public transport is a shambles outside high density cities, and in many of those. Here in SF, it takes me an hour to get downtown by bus or subway, and 10-15 minutes by bus.

[potatolicious]

Right, but the idea is that there seems to be a large preference towards high density cities going forward, so it seems like self-driving cars improve a lifestyle that is to some degree actively being abandoned.

I think OP's point is (to paraphrase) "why all this when the population is moving into high density cities where this complex infrastructure already exists and presents a superior choice to cars, self-driving or otherwise".

Or from a more global perspective "why all this when the US is the only major market that is likely to continue having a mass suburban population in the long term, and the rest of the world has already urbanized and will continue to do so, already has highly robust mass transit infrastructure, is actively building even more of said infrastructure, and that is rapidly attracting even more population?"

There is a particularly common dream among American urbanists that suburban America will somehow rapidly urbanize - I don't think that's particularly true, but it's certainly true the rest of the world has urbanized, and will continue urbanizing rapidly. So the question is if self-driving personal cars (as opposed to say, commercial cargo vehicles) will largely be an American phenomenon, and if so, doesn't that present fairly modest total addressable market for a company the scale of Apple.

[WalterSear]

And I'm living in a high density city, where the public transportation is barely usable.

[WalterSear]

EDIT: that should be 10-15 minutes by car.