Waymo isn't selling cars to customers though and has no plans to. They want to run a taxi service like Uber. They don't want the liability of customers owning the vehicles and maybe modifying them and then getting bad press exactly like Tesla gets over it's system.
Waymo and Uber seem to be of the opinion that car ownership is going to disappear which continues to boggle my mind. The US absolutely needs car ownership for anyone not living downtown in a city, which is over 50% of the US population. People shouldn't be looking at them as examples.
Why does the US need car ownership? wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
The trouble with this capacity utilization argument is that the driving happens roughly at the same time. One could also argue that we can get rid of 2/3 of beds because humans sleep only 8 out of 24 hours on average. Aside from many practical limitations, the trouble is that the majority of people sleep in the same timeframe.
Car usage is obviously directly tied to road usage. High road usage leads to congestion. In a sense, you want there to be a limit of the number of cars on the road: Just under what would start causing significant slowdown.
The fixed costs of owning a car are expensive, but typical city/suburban usage ignoring work commute easily makes the costs worth it. The time expense of using public transit or the dollar expense of relying on lyft/uber are simply too high.
Self driving cars have some advantages:
They reduce the cost of sporadic non-peak usage. For some this will make the work commute on public transit a dollars+time net savings. This pressure will be especially high on 2+ car households, where the economics of a second car will be abysmal.
Self driving cars can act as a much more efficient feeder to public transit. At any given time, especially during peak usage, there are a bunch of people going from approximately where you are to approximately where you're going.
We aren't taking advantage of this today because of two problems: Coordination is hard and requires a critical mass. Any time stopped just kills average speed, greatly increasing time to get to a destination (this is why busses are soooo sloooow.)
Self driving cars can take people from their houses in suburban neighborhoods to coordination locations. Hop in a small bus/shuttle with a few others. Wait no more than a minute or two as cars arrive. Then the shuttle takes everyone to their destination (if it's a high density city where the destination is within a block), or the reverse of a feeder, where single person taxis are already there waiting to take you, with a pause as long as it takes to get out of a vehicle, walk a few feed, and get in another.
I fundamentally believe that car dependence is built into North American suburbia (how much of this is by design is another matter - plenty of people claim that the car and oil industries have been making sure their products will continue to be in demand for decades to come).
Public transport and bikes are not feasible in Houston or Los Angeles, due to low density and hostile roads.
Going back to your argument, I believe all of this would also be possible with cabs, from a user's perspective the only difference between an autonomous car and an Uber might be price (over the long term)
High speed rail between large agglomerations like SF/LA seem like obvious improvements,but seem impossible to build in the USA.
Owning a car means you get the exact 2 hours you need rather than waiting for the 2 hours a taxi company will sell you. It means you can use the car as 24 hour storage for all the things you keep in your car. It means sometimes you can use the car for way more than 2 hours in a day. You can share the car with other people at minimal additional cost. It means you can live in a rural place 2 hours from the nearest taxi company and not have to pay for 2 hours of additional time as the empty taxi comes to you and 2 hours more when it returns after you're done with it.
For many people a robot taxi is a viable alternative to car ownership, but for plenty of people owning a car is always going to be a better option.
Cause freedom. You're talking about the U.S. Why does the US need gun ownership? Cause.
> wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
I hear this again and again and I wonder how detached from reality people are. There are many reasons this won't happen. People have different standards of cleanliness. People have different standards of how much scratches they tolerate on a car. People view cars as status symbols. The list goes on.
People buy condos even though a rental would financially make more sense. But they want to own something they can call theirs and do with it whatever they want or keep it pristine to their liking.
It makes lots of sense to me that they would target miles transported vs owners.
When I lived ~10 miles outside of a town, I would have been fine not having a car if I could reliably summon cheap transport. In a small town, all the same. The amount of waiting matters, but not that much.
Waymo and Uber seem to be of the opinion that car ownership is going to disappear which continues to boggle my mind. The US absolutely needs car ownership for anyone not living downtown in a city, which is over 50% of the US population. People shouldn't be looking at them as examples.