It is predicted that autonomous cars will reduce America's fleet of vehicles by something like 10-fold [1]. I think it will unfold something like this: FIRST, instead three cars for mom, dad and kid, the average family has one car that drops mom off to work, then dad, and then the teen off to school. SECOND, aforementioned car makes use of its down time to drive strangers around via Uber, Lyft, et cetera. The car's o…
I can picture all of those things happening to some extent and still would only estimate a 3-5x reduction in fleet size. In order to get 10x, you are implicitly estimating that rush hour vehicle utilization is currently only 10%. I would estimate that rush hour utilization is in the range of 50-70%. For 10x, you would absolutely have to do something to address peak time behavior. For example, if Mom, Dad, and Junior…
10x is admittedly bullish. I expect 4 to 7x within 20 years, i.e. 3 to 4 product cycles. But 10x is more reasonable than it seems at face value.
Let's use Manhattan to illustrate. Another HN user (wadenick) kindly provided [1] some references I'd like to point to. Car ownership across the United States stands at 81% of households [2]. In Manhattan it's 23% [3]. Manhattan has roughly fewer than 1/3 the number of cars as the rest of America. This is partly why there are only 39 gas stations in Manhattan (down from 60 in 2004) [4]. Repair shops, too, are fewer and further in between. Many are owned by taxi operators for their fleets' use only.
Uber pays 75% of its earnings to its drivers. How much cheaper could a driverless be? 50% less? How would that tilt our 23% figure? All it takes is half of Manhattan's car-owning households to switch for Manhattan to hit a 7-fold reduction in car ownership from present-day America.
Everywhere isn't Manhattan. Density matters. Less-dense locales will need to accept some combination of higher wait times, higher prices or lower rates of fleet reduction. That said, the scaling economics are nearly identical. Fleets will be cheaper than individually-owned self-driving cars because they can more efficiently use their down time. This, in turn, makes individually car ownership more expensive (by degrading retail-servicing infrastructure and supply chains). That, in turn, makes fleet usage more desirable and so on.
The degree to which this happens may vary. But at its lower bound, I'd posit 4x and at its higher bound over 10. Given that income and urban dwelling are correlated, and continue to increase in their correlation, that bodes badly for the edge-case rural families demanding high degrees of simultaneity at a price even remotely approaching what it costs to maintain a small garage of cars today.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837732
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20140209114811/http://data.worldb...
[3] http://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-cars
[4] http://www.wnyc.org/story/say-goodbye-manhattans-gas-station...