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>Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.

Because it will probably still be cheaper if they use it regularly (as is owning in most cases). Because they want a specifically equipped vehicle for young kids/outdoor activities/etc. Because when they want a car, they want one right now.

I'm also skeptical that, if you own a vehicle, it would make any sense to then also rent robo-taxis locally. Certainly I can reserve a private car for an evening event today but it would be 10x or more the cost of parking/gas.

Hard to know what pricing will be, but consider: - Self-driving vehicle wait times may be reduced to less than a minute as they become more common - Car ownership also requires the expenses of: insurance, maintenance, fuel, registration, and storage space - Self-driving vehicles may come in many shapes and sizes: suited to carrying a single person for a family of 6

Likewise. I would really love it if robotaxis worked out and - crucially - were cheap, because I think it could feasibly increase transit usage, not decrease it. It solves the last mile problem in an elegant way. Nobody said you needed to take the taxi all the way to your destination. You could hop on a regional train or light rail, have a robotaxi near-perfectly timed (if we assume the train runs on time...) to pick you up at your destination stop, and ride it to your final destination. Same in reverse. No waiting for a bus to transfer to, no riding the bus slowly stop by stop, no walking from the bus stop to your final destination, etc.

I'm as much of a transit advocate as the next guy, but I think a lot of people blind themselves to how annoying the last mile problem is for a lot of destinations anywhere outside of urban cores. There aren't going to be train stations built at every possible origin point and destination point, and even if there's a robust bus network, transfers, slow speed/frequent stopping, and the walk to/from your destination/origin are pretty damn annoying. They're not the end of the world by any means, to be clear, (I use buses too!) but it's just, if I have a car, why wouldn't I just drive?

Taxis have the potential to solve that in a great way. But I (...and probably most people?) don't currently use them for that purpose since they're way too expensive. As they should be, it's a whole human being tending to your transport personally for twenty minutes or more. If robotaxis can lower the price, it'd be great, but I don't know how confident I am on that happening. The equipment is presumably expensive, the car itself is expensive (though EVs do have much lower maintenance costs), the R&D is expensive. We'll see. Exciting times!

We won't need as many of them but the ones we use will be almost constantly on the road, 20 cars on the road all the time is more traffic than 100 cars on the road 10% of the time and in people's garages the rest of the time

Why would 20 cars be constantly on the road? The cars would sit in parking lots, ready for a call. The actual road traffic, will not change. 1000 people going to work is 1000 people going to work irrespective whether they own the car.

The biggest change would be the lack of a need for parking. This will allow us to build more densely.

You'd have more cars constantly on the road because the smaller pool of cars has to also travel to where the people are. If I go from A to B and later from B to A, a robotaxi would also need to get to A and B when I need them. It really won't matter if they're in use or drove off to a parking lot somewhere else, that is extra traffic.

Wait, are there 1000 people going to work, and then the car parking outside of work? Or are those cars leaving where the people work to go elsewhere? the later creates more cars on the road. Sure those 1000 cars can go somewhere to park - but now we can't build much denser as we still need parking for the cars. Maybe we can move the cars out a bit for more density where people work, but then we need roads to get those cars back out.

The amount of traffic will increase because people who couldn’t drive before and would ride with other people or use public transit (eg. children and the elderly) can now hail cheap autonomous cars, inefficiently using an entire car for their trip.

Induced demand economics. Make something cheaper and people use more of it.

If Autonomous cars make ride hailing cheaper we’ll see an explosion in its use, and traffic will increase as cars are space inefficient and road size fixed.

Traffic and travel time is a much smaller concern when you can be watching Netflix instead of making sure you don't hit, or get hit by anyone.

Traffic and travel time are still a concern: Will I get to work in time for my shift? When I get home how much time will I have for dinner before [whatever you have planned that night]. When do I need to get into this car to make it to [whatever event]

If you are a single person working a flexible schedule (no mandatory meetings), with no other activities planned traffic and travel time are not a big deal. However if you have any life at all you will care about traffic and travel time because you have places to be. Watching netflix is not your goal it is how you kill time that you would prefer to do something else.

Everything will be the exact same if not worse.

People will continue to all commute at similar times, resulting in the same traffic as before. That it is automated makes no difference.

And supposing a car can go off after and do some taxi work instead of being parked, well it still has to commute from here to there which is adding even more cars constantly onto the roads driving to where they’re needed whereas before they’d be parked.

The likely outcome is permanent rush hour as cars are constantly going back and forth on the highway.