[jerf]

Nonsense. You start with driverless cars that can use existing infrastructure with everybody else, then as the density of driverless cars goes up over time, you take advantage of the other economies that emerge. At some point, probably decades later, eventually society will simply ban driverless cars, but you don't have to start there. There's no need for a "big bang" event.

By the time that happens, the "poor" won't have to "replace" their car, because they'll already have dumped the expensive rust-buckets for time-shared rent-a-cars. It's the rich that will be the last holdouts, not the poor.

[hardtke]

By simply adding autonomous cars to the current infrastructure, it doesn't improve peoples lives in a directly obvious way. They can't go any faster, and traffic does not get reduced. Yes, there is the imperceptible benefit of a slight reduction in the probability of death, but a recent New Yorker article pointed out that antisepsis was slow to be adopted because the benefits were not as easily measurable -- in contrast, anesthesia, invented at the same time, was adopted worldwide almost instantly. I personally would only buy a driverless car if it meant I could immediately get where I am going twice as fast. Otherwise, I rather enjoy driving.

[jerf]

It benefits the person owning the driverless car, who can now do something other than drive while still moving from A to B. You seem to be insisting on thinking collectively, but that's not how people decide or act. It only has to benefit the owner for it to sell.

The rich will be the last to let their human driven cars go, but they'll also obviously be the first to adopt them, once they're safe. In this case, the rich other than the ultra rich, who can already afford cars-they-don't-drive... giving further evidence that, yeah, people want this.

Your argument would, for instance, seem to explain why cars never took off... why, one car hardly benefits anyone. There aren't even any car suitable roads, after all, and think of all the horses the smelly, loud thing will spook! But... that's not how people buy things.

The collective benefits come later. The individual benefits come first.