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As I mentioned elsewhere, this argument somehow equivocates black car services with car sharing. The point is, why own a car that you have to maintain, depreciates, and requires parking when you can have brand new, well-maintained vehicles transporting you around for a small monthly fee?

Your Bill Gates analogy only seals my argument. Bill Gates, in all liklihood, has a personal driver and rides in a top of the line vehicle most of the time, that he may or may not own. (He likely doesn't care.) The reason this lifestyle is only available to the rich is not because of the cost of the car, but because of the cost of the driver. If the driver were to be removed, your average person could likely afford to be transported in a clean, new, safe, well-maintained vehicle they pay for on-demand from an autonomous vehicle fleet.

Why own a washing machine when you can rent one at a laundromat for a small monthly fee?

Why own a phone when you can rent a payphone for a small monthly fee?

The answer is a combination of convenience and personal status.

> The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you?

If I can press a button on my iPhone and have nearly any brand or quality of waffle iron appear on my counter in 30 seconds, then disappear automatically to save counter-space once I no longer need it--then wow, yes, please, sign me up for "sharing." It sounds vastly, absurdly better than ownership.

> Do you think Bill Gates' car will be out delivering packages when he's not in it? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates?

Well first, there's the obvious question: do you think Bill Gates rents an apartment? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates?

Besides--when Bill Gates travels, I highly doubt he buys a new car in every city he lands in. He probably gets into a limo. Just like buying a new car while traveling would seem absurdly wasteful today, owning a car (plus a garage/insurance/gas) might seem absurdly wasteful when you can get the exact same feature-set for a fraction of the cost.

Freaking American biases. There are cities in the world where infrastructure sucks, people are many, and parking is rare. I already take a taxi to and from work, this robo car thing will catch on really fast here, of only to optimize throughput in a very congested city where there is no room for new roads.

How is what your parent described unique to America?

America has lots of space, low cost of car ownership and operation. Parent was talking about parking costing only $1.50 or $2, I mean, nowhere else in the world, even developing world, is parking ever that cheap!

It is cheaper for me to take a taxi than drive because the taxi doesn't have to park, obviously, the taxi doesn't just go back to where they came from after taking me to my destination. Crazy americans, they live in such a fantasy world and they don't realize it.

Do you really think an autonomous car will seek out and join a traffic jam? How many times do you think an owner of an autonomous car will have to be left stranded because their car intentionally got itself stuck in a traffic jam and couldn't pick them up before they trade that vehicle in for one without such a short sighted "optimisation"?

The point is at any given moment, a given car is not "your car." If car A gets stuck in a traffic jam, and car B suddenly becomes the optimal vehicle from the fleet to get to you from a cost/time perspective, then suddenly car B begins travelling to you. Congestion on highways becomes a shared cost to all travelers, those who are in transit and those who are awaiting transit, and as such those travelers are able to potentially bid or pay in commensurate to how they value the time they have or will lose due to the congestion.

Basically, there is no free lunch, a traffic jam is a capacity problem where demand outstrips supply, so unless you assume autonomous vehicles (once collectively networked as part of a national system) are somehow going to be less efficient at using road capacity than the same vehicles being driven by independent humans who have no global information, they will be a better solution. The fact that autonomous vehicles will be able to utilize alternative routes off-highway pre-emptively before actual congestion occurs alone is huge. Nevermind the fact that a large reason traffic jams occur is actually not a capacity problem per se, but due to a propagation of small jams into larger ones, in both time and space, due to human beings controlling the vehicle and propagating traffic waves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave

In other words, traffic jams caused by accidents, road blockages, merging, or any other non-capacity related issues will likely no longer occur if the vehicles are autonomously controlled.

Why not a tragedy of the commons with "rational agent" cars that are attempting to minimize parking fees. A neat idea but I think if driverless cars did this then cities would adopt traffic jam fees to realign their cost/benefit strategy in the "driving" game.

> The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you?

Probably because they can't be bothered with the small logistics of a sharing system. But it isn't totally unheard of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system

If not for some sense of selflessness, such systems should at the least motivate the more frugally-minded people: only borrowing or renting rarely used appliances, offering and getting services from each other with minimal bureaucracy, and optionally operating within a sort of currency system that isn't taxable.