Surge pricing can be flattened out by making these autonomous vehicles convertible and capacious. During peak commute load, they function as high-density passen

Surge pricing can be flattened out by making these autonomous vehicles convertible and capacious. During peak commute load, they function as high-density passenger vehicles. During low commute load, they function as light freight vehicles -- courier services, delivery services, even mail. I could even see someone like Amazon running their own fleet of delivery vehicles and offsetting the maintenance and management costs by letting the vehicles run in "taxi mode" (with flip-up seats) during commute times. Think AWS for vans/light trucks. In such a scenario, they wouldn't even need to necessarily charge market rates to commuters. They could offer the service below cost and still make money, as their primary profit driver would be their delivery services. The sheer number of parties that stand to gain from this makes it almost inevitable, to my mind.