That is where autonomous cars, turning up at a phone call, will make travel easier.
And where are they going to charge themselves ?
The business plan I have read is that, like buses, they go back to the company's depot. There they will be charged, cleaned and sent back out again. The London Black Cab TX5 recharges to 80% on 25 minutes.
Let’s get real here by looking at some numbers.
I live in the city of Bath, which has a population of around 95000 (Ref 1). According to the RAC Foundation we own 526 vehicles per 1000 of population (Ref 2, latest figure I can find). So that’s 49970 vehicles. The BBC (link earlier in the thread) suggests 1/3 of those don’t have off-street charging, so that’s 16657 vehicles.
Now, how many of those can be replaced by auto-Ubers ? That’s tricky, clearly it’s not going to be 1:1, but the calculation needs to make assumptions about how many will be needed simultaneously (eg everyone needing to go to work during the rush hour), plus some will always be charging back at the depot. I’m going to assume we’ll only need 20% of 16657, which is 3331 auto-Ubers but you can pick your own number if you think that’s not realistic.
That is one huge out of town depot which has to be within a reasonable distance of the city. To put that into perspective, Bath has 3 P&R sites totalling around 2500 spaces. The Council recently failed in an attempt to build a fourth due to a combination of there being no suitable site and very strong local opposition. So what chance of a massive auto-Uber depot ? And before anyone points out that you could convert the existing P&Rs to auto-Uber depots, those are heavily used by people travelling in from elsewhere so there’s not enough room for them to also accommodate auto-Uber’s for residents.
Whilst I’ve used a particular city as an example, it’s going to be similar elsewhere. And let’s not forget that a large auto-Uber network will actually increase congestion (albeit not local pollution) because of the need for the extra journeys to/from the depot and from job to job.
So sorry, I just don’t think an auto-Uber system is going to provide the solution.
References
(1) Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath,_Somerset(2) RAC Foundation:
https://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/downloadables/car%20ownership%20rates%20by%20local%20authority%20-%20december%202012.pdf