Agree with your point. It raises another question for me - if we are talking about shared or non-owned vehicles that people interchangably call and use when they need to go somewhere, aren't we inching closer to the same experience that other means of public transportation provide? And shouldn't we give those equal consideration to a world that is still built for and dominated by cars? For all the benefits we are all citing here, there are still a lot of problems with a world dominated by cars (pollution, the space they take up, the roads they require that cut up communities and are inhospitable to pedestrians / other modes of transportation, etc.)
Space waste happens because(1) ego, which means buying big and snarly cars to look like an action hero, (2) over-provision of car space, because you sit in one seat of a five-seat car on the off chance you might have passengers or cargo (3) cars parked, idle.
Robo-taxis have an economic attractor at the "runs forever, gets good mileage" end of the design scale, because energy and maintenance are the biggest ongoing costs. There would be incentives to make them small and efficient, maybe sized for one occupant. And they would not sit around idle, so they would need a long MTBF, which rules out designing for speed or beefiness and suggests electric (it's got fewer moving parts).
All of which means, fewer, smaller, cleaner, slower, simpler, vehicles. Aesthetes will pine for the days of muscle cars. In terms of green-ness, they may come to eclipse buses etc, while retaining the advantages of cars (goes where you want, when you want, and is not full of strangers).
