[montenegrohugo]

In relation to the transportation-problem being discussed, autonomous vehicles are much better than normal privately owned cars because (in theory) they do not need any parking, at least not in premium inner city ground. They can just drive away and park somewhere where they aren't disturbing anyone, and come back when needed. Alternatively, if they are part of a car sharing service, the % of time the car is not being used and is therefore a wasted resource is going down. A normal car is only being used for what, 5-10% of the day? the rest of the time it is a completely wasted resource. If a car is not owned by an individual but by a group of consumers, a much smaller amount of cars is needed to satisfy transportation needs for the entire group.

Of course, even though they have these two advantages, they will still pollute(if not electric, and even so because they must transport more mass than say a scooter, and the electricity still needs to be generated at an external power plant) and create noise pollution and they also need to use traffic lanes and road-infrastructure.

[calebh]

People buy cars with their worst case transportation requirement in mind. By moving car ownership to an external fleet, people will be free to only use the extra transportation capacity as needed. Why are we spending all of this energy to accelerate giant metal boxes when most of the trips in cars are only to get a person from point A to point B? It's incredibly inefficient. Self-driving cars and electric bikes are going to completely change the transportation paradigm inside of dense cities.

[oftenwrong]

You have to account for reduced cost of driving. Not just in dollar cost, but the cost of stress and driving time. This could lead to increased demand for car trips.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[claydavisss]

100% wrong....autonomous vehicles will result in vastly more cars on urban roads, idling or driving around in circles waiting to do profitable work...it will shortly become an epidemic requiring congestion legislation

think about it....if you set up an autonomous ride sharing service, your path to profitability lies in having cars closer to prospective riders. so it makes total sense to put as many cars on the road as possible....it's not like there is a person driving who must be compensated or fed

[Fricken]

There isn't really much political will to mitigate car dependency and curb sprawl, but if hypothetically there were, it would still take half a century of concerted effort to reshape our cities into something a little less dystopian, and in that meantime autonomous vehicles would be very effective for shuttling people between their homes and major transportation hubs, because busses on feeder routes just don't work very well out in the burbs.

[jandrewrogers]

This has been modeled and studied extensively by the car companies to understand market sizing in a fully autonomous world. Everything points to a rather dramatic reduction (integer factor) in the number of cars on the streets, which needless to say is a dire outlook for those businesses.

[hfdgiutdryg]

The Segway was banned from San Francisco sidewalks almost immediately upon release. You really think NIMBYs are going to sit quiet as the streets fill up with empty cars circling like sharks?

[lallysingh]

As many cars as concurrent rides the market demands. There's always an upper limit.