Most of the cost of a taxi service is in wages to the human driver. With an autonomous car, you don't have the driver, so the service can be cheaper (especially with electric cars). I lived for about a year without a car, using Uber instead. But when I tallied my Uber usage, it ended up being about $600 per month. So I got a car instead and saved a lot of money. If this could be reduced to $200 - $300 per month, it would have been a different matter entirely.
I think you're basically agreeing with the parent. Like Zipcar and Uber, autonomous vehicle technology when it's eventually available will almost certainly be one more incremental step toward enabling reduced personal car ownership in edge cases.
