having lived a good fraction of my adult life without a car i'd be the last person to disagree that a person can get along without a car as long as the person lives in an urban area.
If the urban dweller can dial up uber/lyft and the car self-drives to the urbanite, then that should work (caveat below). In the vast fraction of the US that is rural, i dont think that fully autonomous uber/lyft vehicles will make up a significant fraction of vehicles.
I'll also stick to my pessimistic and skeptical outlook on human behavior and the inability of programmers and sensor manufacturers to deal with fully autonomous driving in a 10 yr timeframe. I figure if Boeing cant get an angle of attack sensor and its software to function properly in a passenger airplane, then the more complex, vehicle and organism dense environment that automobiles move in is hopeless.
I'll also stick to my belief that in your envisioned scenario, drunks and other bad actors will be a serious problem for uber/lyft. They should constitute a prolific customer base but i'm confident that they will present a significant and creative set of liabilities and costs. As another example, I can picture autonomous uber/lyfts as mobile brothels. The response might be to install cameras and microphones but those will also be defeated.
Without a monitor or personal vestment, some folks will not behave in ways that other folks find acceptable and those bad actors will kill the benefit that would otherwise exist for the majority.
