I don't see there being a measurable shift in car ownership, if anything there are a record number of vehicles on the road currently.......
Don't get me wrong ride sharing AV's with have absolutely a place in the market but for a lot of people cars are much more than just transport and are very much an essential tool for modern life and is not something that should be underestimated.......
I fully appreciate that mine is a controversial position. Some might say I am a bit crazy to even suggest "chord cutting of cars" on the Motors site of Overclockers!! The heresy of it. And I do agree that resistance to change is strong but I truly believe change is coming.
Approximately 10 years ago when Google started developing their self driving vehicle, they were virtually alone in this. Their objective: solve a major global problem----1.2 million road traffic accidents globally every year of which more than 90% are the fault of the human driver. Wind the clock forward a few years later, say 2015, and Google concludes after extensive testing of their semi-autonomous vehicles, that their future AVs will be fully machine driven with no human driver intervention. Their conclusion was that this was the only viable way to achieve their goal and that safety was their number one objective in their AV. OEMs saw their logic and began to get extremely worried about their business model: selling vehicles requiring human drivers. Again, Google was largely on its own here but OEMs were beginning to recognise that a new world was emerging where they would either at least provide major technological improvements in their cars to "assist" the human driver (a typical reaction of an incumbent trying to slow down the change) or face major disruption by technology companies (ie, be road kill--no pun intended).
Wind the clock forward a few more years to 2018 and now a number of OEMs recognise that their current business model of selling vehicles to private owners on a semi-autonomous basis is flawed---eg, Ford, GM, JLR, Fiat Chrysler, etc and that only a partnership with tech companies can survive the change that is coming---the move to Level 4/5 AVs (yes EVs) that will be owned by large fleets (with substantial bargaining power over prices) providing inexpensive ride hailing services to the public that will be safer than any vehicle operating with human drivers. One could therefore argue that the car manufacturers themselves are contributing to their own disruption! Once resistant, they are now embracing the change. They saw what Apple and Google did in smartphones to incumbents--both operators and manufacturers.
Over time I see private vehicle ownership changing to a shared mobility model. Will it take time? Yes. Will it happen faster than some think? Yes, faster than the pure deniers think but slower than the early adopters think. The safety factor and the pure economics will help drive such adoption. City dwellers will likely be early adopters. Uber and Lyft are creating this rethink anyway, even with human driven ride sharing vehicles.
I prefer not to get into details (eg, your child barfing in the back seat or the urban v surban factors, etc) at this stage because I do not think these detract from the fundamental argument in favour of the ultimate machine/robot driven vehicle that is not individually owned.
I offer up this analogy. As recently as 10 years ago, TV was dominated by the main networks (in the US---CBS, NBC, etc) and by cable/pay TV companies (Comcast, Charter, etc). The idea of chord cutting was the exception....a rarity. Then churn and chord cutting became more prevalent. Now who is the dominant player on the TV screen? Netflix, with YouTube being a viable alternative too. And we are talking about consumers facing a relatively small up front cost with cable TV for example compared to the cost of a vehicle.
I appreciate there are many differences between chord cutting on TVs and chord cutting on cars but there are also similarities, which is why I draw the analogy.
Bob Dylan: I Feel a Change Comin' On
