Most cars spend most of their time sitting doing nothing.
When you can cheaply have a car at your doorstep in 5 minutes at any time of the day or night, why bother owning one? We'll have to have self-driving cars before that can happen.
But some people will still need their own vehicles. I don't see off-road vehicles being replaced any time soon, for instance.
It depends how much cheaper and how much of a proportion of my income it is. If its 10% cheaper to rent one every time I needed/wanted one, I'll just but my own and not have to put up with the grief. They would have to be substantially cheaper to give up private ownership. I can see it working in big city centres where there is already very good and affordable public transport to take second cars off the road.
It also really works with autonomous cars, if public transport or renting a car from Enterprise was cheaper or offered a better service than ownership, ownership would have died already. In reality public transport in the main is worse and more expensive and renting is just grief wile being more expensive.
You also have to consider the behaviour of people, particularly families with young children. When said car arrives, you need to spend 15-20 mins fitting child seats, loading said children and all relating stuff that comes with having a dependent child before you can actually go anywhere. You'll also need somewhere to store all that stuff in your hose! That compared to walking out the front door, putting your kids into your own car where the seats are already in place, the buggy is in the boot with the nappy bag.
Also when you get to the other end you'll have to keep the car on hire otherwise you'll have to carry around child seats and all the other rubbish families keep in their cars all day and then complete the same 20 min process when the return car comes. It sounds like an utterly terrible experience.
I’ve been saying this for months.
Electric vehicles are a pipe dream for most.
Not really, an MG5 is only about £5k more expensive than a Ford Focus but costs a fraction to run. Over its lifetime the MG5 will be considerably cheaper. How is that a pipe dream?