ocschwar the unpronounced.

It seems like an open market should allow for a bunch of possibilities. Everything from shared cars with specific features (car-seat, smoking permitted, bike-rack), to personally owned cars for the extended handbag feature (or for people who live too far from an urban center or take too many trips for the shared car to make financial sense.) We own a car in part, because we take enough trips that it's close, if not cheaper than zipcar, and it's sometimes really convenient to just have it. I could see the shared autonomous cars solving the second problem, especially if they get over some of the issues with cabs (especially how soon will it get here if I call.) While more shared cars and fewer personal ones will hurt car companies, I think the group this really hurts is cab drivers, oh, hey, and let's extrapolate to automated busses while we're here. It seems like it would make sense to make more trains driverless first though (certainly some airport trams and the like have already done this) since they have fewer degrees of freedom than cars.