I don't think they will thrive in that scenario. Uber's got a few advantages, but I think they mostly boil down to being the first ones to have an app, and hav

I don't think they will thrive in that scenario. Uber's got a few advantages, but I think they mostly boil down to being the first ones to have an app, and having a whole bunch of VC cash to pour into a business that hasn't proven to be any more profitable for them in the past few years than it has been for everyone else over the past couple centuries. They've got one big disadvantage, which is that the fleet maintenance costs for their service model are extraordinarily high. There are no in-house mechanics, and there's no fleet standardization. They've been able to get by without that through a combination of that VC money, and being able to shift the fleet maintenance costs onto the ledgers of their drivers, who presumably aren't generally factoring those costs in when forming a business plan. I don't know when self-driving cars will be fully autonomous. But it seems a pretty safe bet that, by the time they do, their advantages in the app and the VC cash department will have eroded away. By that point we're back to the same old commoditized, race-to-the-bottom industry that, minor departures aside, has characterized taxi service since the horse and buggy days. At which point there's no room for individual owners anymore. In that kind of industry environment, the people who have standardized fleets and in-house mechanics will always be able to outcompete the people who need to pay Volvo dealer prices for vehicle maintenance. I also don't know when self-driving cars will be cheap enough that typical individual owners will have either the need or the inclination to massively jump their depreciation rate, or to subject them to wear and tear by random strangers. But it seems a safe bet that's going to be a long way along the technology's maturity arc. I, personally, wouldn't be willing to lay down cash to bet whether the long term looks like a bunch of individuals renting out cars they own anyway, or people mostly not owning cars because it's not worth the trouble to own one anymore. For my part, though, I'm more keenly interested in the latter - right now, for me, the main value proposition behind owning a car is that it's kind of a hassle to haul myself to a car rental shop when I want one for a weekend trip. That hassle disappears when they can just send the car to me instead. tl;dr - Uber's "sharing economy" model, attractive as it sounds, never really made a whole lot of economic sense in the long view. Their more likely futures are to either become one of the traditional taxi companies, or be squashed by them.