The good news is that unlike a manned taxi, a robocab does have much fixed per-hour cost. Basically, when a community can afford to have a considerable number o

The good news is that unlike a manned taxi, a robocab does have much fixed per-hour cost. Basically, when a community can afford to have a considerable number of personal vehicles on passive standby, it could be enough of a market to support a somewhat similar number of robocabs on passive standby. Remote areas will certainly not be where commercial robocabs will start, but there is no reason to assume that it would be generally impossible our necessarily more inconvenient. Not-so-commercial robot car pools might even start getting viable in rural areas, because some countries mandate a minimum level of public transport coverage and basing a few robocabs in remote villages could be many orders of magnitude cheaper (and certainly more useful) than repeatedly driving an empty bus around just to fulfill a schedule so sparse that only the most desperate will ever bother using it. Another angle that might lead to pockets of rural adoption much earlier than expected: many rural populations already have a lot of experience with pooling agricultural vehicles, this could occasionally be a seed for adopting local pool e.g. to support the elderly and doubling as a fallback for personal vehicles.