Please help me understand something about self-driving cars

[mr_lebowski]

56. Well, in theory if people stop buying and owning cars in large numbers and are told 'you WILL share

rides with others' using hailed rides in self-driving electric cars (vans in cities would likely make sense) in theory the demand over time would be pretty steady except late at night. Good time for the cars to go to their charging up station/maintenance locations.

Usage patterns would go into algorithms that would move the cars into neighborhoods where usage is likely to be high at a given time (when a basketball game gets out, when the bars are closing, etc). The guidance computers, knowing everyone's destination and plugged into the traffic grids thus knowing about slowdowns (in theory you get WAY less slowdowns if most people are actually carpooling in this fashion) and such will calc the very most efficient routes to get everyone to their required destinations, etc.

Remote/small towns it could be fairly inefficient but suburbs and cities it could become efficient enough that effectively you'd have a ton of 'carpooling' and a whole lot less cars needing to be created in the first place ... building cars has a HUGE environmental impact.

If 'things' are done smartly (that's a big if) the potential for a huge fleet of self-driving cars and vans has the potential to provide a positive environmental impact, mostly through lots of carpooling and reduced demand for car ownership, plus they should be electric and run on wind/solar/geo to greatest extent possible.