[danpat]

Economics has also already given us lots of information on how much money people are prepared to sink into transportation - the owners of the self-driving cars/rental companies will attempt to extract that value.

I don't doubt there will be a shift in the overall economic picture, but it may not be as large for the car _user_ as we would hope. It will need to be better/cheaper in some dimension for it to get adopted, but the rent-seeking vultures are always circling, spoiling the utopia :-(