Private car ownership has not been unusual in developed countries. There is a reason so many large car manufactures are not American, after all. It's not just t

Private car ownership has not been unusual in developed countries. There is a reason so many large car manufactures are not American, after all. It's not just to sell to people in NA and Australia. What's different about the US and those other places is that far more large cities were built after private automobiles were common. There are cars everywhere in both countryside and cities in Italy, say, but there is ALSO more walkability and transit because the cities were there first (and even there, there are cities like Florence that didn't invest in rail for decades before starting to build some more light rail again very recently). China is something of an odd one out for development patterns because of the much higher levels of state control. What I don't really see is places voluntarily giving up point-to-point private transit after having it as an easy option for generations. Places where even the super-wealthy have turned in their private cars and drivers and take the bus with everyone else. I think the market that self-driving cars could potentially capture over mass transit is exactly those people who would rather have a private point-to-point experience. Which can be an overlapping set with the people who would also be willing to use mass transit if it was "good enough", in addition to the people who actively dislike mass transit. The total pool of users is very large.