You are ignoring a major cost of operating a privately owned car: the time you spend driving it. In the greater NYC commuter area, people already willingly pay

You are ignoring a major cost of operating a privately owned car: the time you spend driving it. In the greater NYC commuter area, people already willingly pay more to live near a train station so they can more easily commute without having to "waste" the time they'd spend driving. (I'm sure this is true elsewhere) People are obviously already putting a price on this. Why pretend the cost of driving yourself is zero? It's absolutely not, unless your time is worthless. Thought experiment: What's the longest commute you'd be willing to bear, if you drive yourself? How about if the car is self driving? If the answer to the latter is larger, you just proved you'd save literal money with a self driving car, not just figurative -- because you could move further away to cheaper housing.