Why would anyone want to own a car? You have to park it, both at your house and at your destination, you have to do maintenance on it, yada yada. What a waste of time and space.
To get from point A to point B without walking half a mile and waiting 10 minutes for a bus to go a quarter the speed to a stop half a mile from your destination. I'm sure a lot of people want a car so they don't have to expose their groceries or small children to the disgusting mess that is public transportation in the vast majority of (American) cities.
The comment I was responding to was saying everyone wants to own their method of transportation. I'm not asking why you would want to drive - I'm asking why you would choose to own a car if there was an alternate world where all the other cars in the city were available to use on demand.
> I'm asking why you would choose to own a car if there was an alternate world where all the other cars in the city were available to use on demand.
there are a lot of reasons, but here are the two big ones. unlike any rental car I've seen at an avis lot, my car is actually fun to drive. you'll never see a car with a manual transmission for rent in america, unless you go on turo. second, I take much better care of my car than most people. after seeing how people treat vehicles they actually own, I don't want to rent a vehicle that hasn't been thoroughly cleaned and inspected after the previous driver.
Availability. I probably want to use a car the same time as everyone else. Price. If there's enough cars to satisfy demand at all times, the capital costs of the network are high which means rates are high.
Basically, a large operation could have economies of scale (in house mechanics, only two models of car to choose from, own the fuel stations...) but the utilization of the vehicles probably would not change dramatically from the utilization of the private "fleet" we have today.
I mean, if they were free, I see your point. But they can't be, which implies paying someone else to do the maintenance, and distribution, plus a fee on top of that for their time. You can scale it any which way (or dodge the second bit and call them independent contractors), but it doesn't change the unit economics nearly enough imo.
