[kafkaesq]

Except they forget that people like owning their personal space -- especially if it's they need to inhabit for multiple hours in the day, pretty much every day.

And (as with the "smart home" advocates), they forget that, outside of the tech crowd - not everyone likes interacting with (and hence, being dependent on) computers for every conceivable need in their life, 24x7.

The ownerless model might work for some people -- but not too many, I suspect.

[santaclaus]

I dunno, of my friends under 35 (San Francisco and Oakland) it is rarer to own a car than to be carless. Most couples I know with cars are also single car families. In cities and the surrounding metros (which continue to grow as a proportion of the US pop) I could totally see an ownerless model working. How many Manhattan residents own cars?

[aetherson]

An important insight here is that if you and your friends already don't own cars, then moving from drivered-rides-for-hire to driverless-rides-for-hire for you and your friends won't reduce car ownership.

Clearly, in every world, the modern one and the future driverless one, childless adults in dense urban areas are the people most likely to benefit from a rides-for-hire approach. Families with children and people who live in suburban, exurban, and rural areas will be the people least likely to rely on rides-for-hire.

One interesting (though not, I think, probably overall very likely) scenario is where total car stock increases in a driverless car world because:

1. Childless urban adults use rides-for-hire, but they already used rides-for-hire and already didn't have cars. Meanwhile, they start substituting some amount of their former public transit travel for the new-cheaper rides-for-hire (so more vehicles are needed to serve them).

2. Families with children and suburban, exurban, and rural families purchase driverless cars instead of signing up for rides-for-hire, because rides-for-hire still don't work very well for them. In fact, they purchase more cars, because the driverless cars offer them more utility than their old cars did.

3. Meanwhile, a smaller number of people in relatively dense suburb do go to rides-for-hire and abandon ownership, but there are relatively few of them and the cars in their localities are relatively poorly utilized, so they don't offset the increases in vehicle stock driven by people in groups 1 and 2.

As I said, I don't think that's overall a likely scenario, but I don't think it's an insane one. I'd say 10% chance of coming about.

[galdosdi]

Indeed. Manhattan residents rarely own cars (IIRC around 20% do), and when they do it's always for some weird miscellaneous reason, these being the most common ones I've noticed:

- it's a toy (like a motorcycle or boat would usually be) or

- it's a business tool (like a sedan owned by a cabdriver or a minivan owned by a deli owner) or

- it's owned by someone who recently moved from a suburb to Manhattan and brought their car along by default (which most of the time, lasts no more than a few months before they learn the transit system, get fed up with parking, and sell the car) or

- they're a law enforcement officer or family member (because LEOs, even personal cars, usually get away with parking murder here, so from a parking perspective, manhattan looks as convenient as a sleepy suburb, to someone driving a car with the right protective LEO markings to ward off tickets)

- more than one of the above

[gtaylor]

FWIW, I'd love to get rid of our car. I don't like fueling, insuring, maintaining, parking, or driving it. I'd rather use that time and money on something else. Cars are a lot of work if you take care of them.

[ativzzz]

This works in dense areas. Much of the Midwest is very sparse. I can't imagine people dropping their cars anywhere in Texas (where I live) anytime soon, but I can't wait for my car to be driverless.