I think that saying that car sharing will be limited to the privileged metropolitan residents is short sighted, too. Services like Zipcar don't work well in less populated areas, because the cars are exactly where the previous person dropped them off. Autonomous cars would be able to relocate themselves to areas where they are needed, and could optimize their deployment very well especially if people scheduled in advance.
Imagine if Uber employed self-driving cars. You ping them on the GPS, and the car comes to the closest point automatically, automatically finds the best route to your destination, and then returns to pick up someone else. It would lower staff costs, have one less person in the car in the event of an accident, and can automatically come to exactly where you are without hassles that may be introduced by relying on people.
Listed as a drawback: "the autonomous car may encourage the use of single-occupancy vehicles"
I don't agree that's a drawback. When enough cars on the road are autonomous, I'll feel much safer riding in a smaller car. As it is, I want a larger car for the safety of it. People keep saying to me, "I'd never ride a Smart Car - what if a semi hits you?!" And a single-passenger car has a much lower environmental footprint than a mostly empty larger car.
That's a pretty good point which I had not considered. However, I would still maintain that it's a drawback compared to the promotion of mass transit which is already hard enough to sell even though it is often as convenient or more convenient than SOV's in city cores.
Mass transit is unpopular in all but the largest cities in the US because it's seen as the poor person's mode of transport, and the fear that there may be unsavory people on the bus. Mass transit is also tied to a tight schedule. I used to take the city bus to class, and I left my house an hour before I needed to be at class eight miles away, because I had to switch buses and that left me waiting at the second bus stop for half an hour.
A self-driving SOV designed for personal use won't give much advantage over the current model (except maybe fewer accidents), but if it encourages ride sharing and leased autonomous cars, it would be a net saving.
