The Core

I think that's true, but I also suspect that suburban & rural families will keep a cheap electric 'beater' or two --probably from the likes of TaTa Motors or Chinee. Once we go autonomous, we won't need crumple zones, bumper impact minimums, air bags, etc.  Some cars will be glorified golf carts.

>decade or two

One.

related: Ford getting ready for the car-pocalypse?

Ford Plans to Cut About 10% of Global Staff

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-16/ford-planning-to-cut-about-10-of-global-workforce-wsj-reports

Want to know why I feel this is bullshit? This quote:

The provision of this service may come virtually free as part of another offering

To which I say

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter....

--  Lewis Strauss, then Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1954

In the cities, perhaps, where car ownership brings far more hassles and far fewer conveniences than in the country. So perhaps for most of the population, that will be true. For most of the US by land area, it will not. 2030 is only 13 years away and the average age of the fleet is now almost that high. So we would expect cars bought today to be about half the fleet in 2030. The person who buys a car in 2022 will need a great value proposition in order to throw it away (as the used market would have collapsed) in order to go to Transport as a Service.

Plus, as Drastic says... How long did it take to rebuild one small stretch of highway after the Loma Prieta earthquake? How long did the Big Dig take? If this changeover requires infrastructure, I don't think we'll see a owner-free car culture by 2030.

>glorified golf carts

^x-post Electric Cars Soon Will Cost Less Than Gasoline Autos, Research Shows
http://www.industryweek.com/energy/electric-cars-soon-will-cost-less-gasoline-autos-research-shows

<added>
For example, do we need airbags if the cars never wreck? No.

Which sets off another whole cycle that allows making cars lighter and thus more efficient and thus cheaper to run.

Also, electric cars supposedly have less than half as many parts as ICE cars, which leads to another set of efficiencies in the long run.

The question is:  will people purchase a car without air bags?  Even if the stats say there are "no" accidents?

The trick is to make the trucks self driving and safe at the same time.  I'm not going to buy a car without safety features and still get stuck in a canyon of semi's driven by humans at 80 mph on the Interstate.  And even then, even though AI can react faster than I can, we are all still subject to the laws of physics.

This is steel country around here, you do not want to tangle with a truck hauling steel coils.