I don't really see it that way. You'd still have the same number of people that need to go placed in a car. And I'm assuming a large number of people don't want people they don't know in the same car they travel in, and would be willing to purchase their own self driving car. I also see self driving cars being replaced sooner as the technology gets better.
Makes no sense, it's guaranteed to reduce the number of cars
produced, hence reduce car sales. The most optimal product is used at all time. Cars are idling most of the time.
The way it will work is a company or government will own a fleet of autonomous cars, and will have an efficient demand-prediction model, mapped to locations, hours, etc. So you'll have an optimal number of cars as part of the fleet according to peak demand. You will certainly still end up with cars being idle as the demand levels vary a lot from day to night and across week days, but it will be a far more optimal use of the cars than having the majority being idle 23 hours a day if not more. Cars will always be going where demand is expected, much like taxis, and more efficiently. Even if you have 50,000 people who want to drive somewhere, so what? Have you looked outside to see how many cars are NOT going anywhere? When they have nothing to do they'll go where they are most likely to be needed, or go back to their station to be serviced/cleaned/etc. Add to this the fact that they'll be designed to be highly fuel efficient if not electric.
It's absolutely certain that autonomous fleets imply much fewer car sales, it's part of the very benefit of the whole thing; fewer cars to produce, less urban space wasted, higher return on investment, variable uses (a car can deliver a pizza just like it can carry someone), etc. Huge savings for municipalities too in not having to go around issuing tickets (they'll issue tickets to people though), and all sorts of other savings.
Add to this the carpooling possibilities (pretty damn simply to design, just put some sliding panels inside, plus you can charge extra for it).
Having your own car will be possible, but a waste of cash.
From what I understand, the eventual goal of autonomous vehicles is for all of these cars to link up together and use the information provided by each vehicle to function as a highly efficient transportation network that would be a lot faster and safer than our current one, which is built around the limitations and unpredictability of human drivers. In order to really take advantage of this technology however, we would have to minimize the number of conventional cars on the road, hence the talk of significantly increasing the cost of ownership or making a handful of special lanes for people who still want to drive themselves, if not relegating manually driven cars to closed circuits and banning them from most roads outright.
Since bicycles (and other alternative transportation methods like electric scooters) will remain human-driven and thus a potential source of human error on roads where autonomous cars are a majority, wouldn't they also need to be regulated by stricter laws like conventional cars (but to a lesser extent), or would you still be able to bike mostly wherever you want just like today?
People are also source of errors. Don't worry, police will still issue tickets, but cycling infrastructure will also be far more well funded and planned thanks to this whole thing to begin with. Bikes will be more popular, not less.
