I'm sorry for any confusion but I did not mean to artificially distinguish driving an owned car versus renting a ride. Same thing, a 10 mile trip on either will

I'm sorry for any confusion but I did not mean to artificially distinguish driving an owned car versus renting a ride. Same thing, a 10 mile trip on either will put the same amount of congestion on the road. People will want to ride in cars more if it's cheaper or easier so we'll have more cars on the road. The total number of cars required to service this traffic may be less, but that will only reduce the number of parked cars. As for maintenance/cost of hardware, I've heard that the LIDAR kit is under $10,000. Given how expensive new cars are and how cheap the same car becomes 10 years later, and given that that's a starting point, I'm not too concerned about depreciation cost. In the western world there are also already so many suckers willing to pay the initial depreciation by buying new cars and then immediately selling them 5 years later for much less so they can pointlessly upgrade again, so the used car market will be filled with affordable self driving cars a few years after they come out. Like, you can already buy a car for less than the combined value of all its parts, because people put a negative premium on old cars. Why would it be any different in the future? And given that LIDAR doesn't have moving parts, I'm not too concerned about the cost of maintenance. When you buy a 15 year old car, it's rarely the ABS or ECU or radio you need to replace, it's always moving parts like parts of the valvetrain, transmission, suspension. And that's if you even use LIDAR. Tesla's cars apparently just use good old cameras. And we know how cheap and reliable those are