That sucks. But if the economics aren’t there for some retired or underemployed person to do some spare Lyft driving where they already own the vehicle - they won’t be there to station fleets of self driving cars across all these less populated areas.
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And I wouldn’t subject my elderly mother to either. On the other hand I’m not happy that she has been driving after taking her medication either.
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Eventually the economics will work. Once the price of a self-driving car drops to around $10k, all kinds of interesting opportunities open up. It’s going to take a decade to get there though.
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Weirdly, the taxi service that used to be there was when the town was smaller. So it’s not theoretically impossible, it just doesn’t exist. Some sort of buses or shuttles could also exist, but they’d have to be heavily subsidized.
Keep in mind, the dynamics of autonomous vehicles aren’t the same as taxis. Currently, for a New York taxi, say, only a third of the fare price goes to the company that owns and services the taxi (and holds the enormous expense of the medallion); the driver is a big part of the cost, obviously, which means eliminating the driver could mean much cheaper rides. We’re also assuming that autonomous vehicles aren’t simply owned by people who currently have cars. I think this is a safe assumption - but only because the dynamics of car ownership (in areas that aren’t completely rural) would be different. At some point the culture changes, and there’s no need to have a private car - at which point a small pool of autonomous vehicles could service a small town and do so profitably.
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Never happen.
“His” car? Are we taking bets?
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It’s unavoidable. If you told somebody in 1978 what computers in 2018 would cost and be able to do, they would also tell you it will never happen.
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We already know what mass produced cars cost. And from a lot further back than 1978.
A $10k self driving car will look more like a large wheeled electric golf cart than a Honda Civic.
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Well - we know the companies are trying to undermine safety requirements- I hope people don’t let them.
Edit:
“Golf carts come in a wide range of formats and are more generally used to convey small numbers of passengers short distances at speeds less than 15 mph (24 km/h) per ANSI Standard z130.1“
If you want to go faster- it can’t safely be like a golf cart.
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Not literally a golf cart, just closer to that than a traditional car.
Google already build something like that but it was limited to 25 mph.
In all fairness only one truck flipped over, the other jackknifed.
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25mph can’t drive on most roads - certainly not the highway.
But whatever it ends up costing - it’s always going to cost more than a comparable car as those cost will apply to them as well. They just won’t need the add on equipment. And no one is projecting car costs to go down to the future equivalent of $10,000.
25 mph isn’t some kind of limit that can never be exceeded in the future, it’s just what Google could make safe a couple of years ago.
it’s always going to cost more than a comparable car as those cost will apply to them as well
It probably won’t. As long as there are a significant number of human drivers on the road, cars have to built to withstand high speed collisions. That means crumple zones, heavy bumpers, air bags, steel reinforced doors, unibody construction, and so on. All of these things make the car much heavier and so you need a bigger engine. Bigger engines are heavier and require transmissions. All of that is very expensive and hard to make less expensive.
Once you get to a point where human drivers are rare or are required to be better trained to share the road with autonomous cars and high speed car wrecks become less likely than plane crashes, then you can do away with most of the heavy construction along with controls in the cabin. When the weight drops, you can go for a smaller electric motor and ditch the transmission, which further drops the weight. That’s how you get to something built similarly to a golf cart. I had a ride in one of those Google cars and that’s pretty much what it felt like. They were thin panels over a tube frame and a small electric motor.
And no one is projecting car costs to go down to the future equivalent of $10,000
If they went into mass production, those Google cars could probably be sold in that ballpark.
These cars will eventually be cheap and they are going to fuel city sprawl like nothing before. Get ready for a huge increase in the number of cars on the road. Two car households will be replaced with four car households because the vehicles are cheap and you lease them for $100 / month with basically no maintenance costs and minimal insurance costs. Every two years you will return it and get the new one. It’s going to be a lot like the cell phone business and that’s why Apple has an on-again-off-again interest in self driving cars.
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And they’ll fly too?
As I said- they’re looking to get rid of needed safety equipment- which shouldn’t be permitted. At all.
There will still be crashes. There will still be equipment failures- there will still be black ice - there will still be gusts that blow light vehicles- there will still be trees that fall unexpectedly onto the road. There will still be deer that jump in front of cars.
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The phrase seems to have fallen out of favor lately, but this is a “Christ, what an asshole” moment if I ever saw one. Just… wow.
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I knew a guy who’d been away from his very small hometown for a few years. He went back to visit and got stuck behind an elderly driver on the main drag. After a few blocks he decided to just pass them via the turn lane, looked over and it was his own mother! 
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Then they make a U-turn.
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Good reminder of how dangerous it is to stop in front of a truck. Those things are like runaway trains.
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