[jh00ker]

One application of (EV) cars is the robotaxi. Once this solution reaches critical mass, car ownership as we see it today will drop off.

If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.

[bmitc]

Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.

[abecedarius]

Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)

[michaelmrose]

This is an excellent point here are a few more.

EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs.

One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.

[xmcqdpt2]

Most car trips today are single person and yet cars are enormous and getting bigger all the time. It's not the regulators, it's the consumers that want the crazy outcomes.

[abecedarius]

https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...

[bmitc]

I doubt that's the case. And how would that work?

If we look at the economics of Uber and Uber Eats, we see that they have shifted to ride sharing and also delivery sharing. In that, it makes more sense to bundle up multiple people and deliveries into one. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like buses?

[abecedarius]

Uber has drivers. There's probably some reason to customize car design for taxis, I'm not sure, but that's a modest difference relative to no driver and the greater expected scale of supplanting most human driving in time.

https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/design-change.html is very old and there are newer discussions, but I'm too lazy to find them for you. Also michaelmrose's answer.

[bmitc]

Whether Uber has drivers or had automated drivers doesn't really matter. I think they show that there isn't much business in point-to-point "automated" car rides.