[ghaff]

>Taxis are incredibly expensive today. Sure you save a lot of money when you don't have to pay a driver, but is it really enough to make car ownership undesirable?

This seems to be a point that is often missed. In denser cities--where utilization can be relatively high--drivers make maybe $15 per hour. (Maybe a bit higher when actually carrying passengers which is probably the relevant metric.) So it's not clear to me how these hypothetical vehicles are going to so revolutionize the way people get around by cutting costs by maybe $15/hour (ignoring other labor costs associated with cleaning or any incremental cost of the vehicle).