It’s a good post. I don’t own a car any more (can fortunately walk or cycle into the city centre where my work is no probs), so just use a car club vehicle as and when required. Think I mentioned it upthread - http://www.co-wheels.org.uk/ Works well. Has deffo swayed me away from the merits of needing to ‘own’ a rapidly depreciating ‘asset’, so one of these hire agreements seems like a more logical proposition should I ever need to have a permanent vehicle.
For better or worse, outright ownership just seems to be a dying concept, and not just with cars. Seems to be all about hire or subscription. I guess homes still have a strong logic behind ownership. Even that might not be a scenario that can be sustained forever, though.
Back to cars, we’ve got some Nissan Leaf electric pool vehicles at work. They’re good. And obviously the way things are going. But they’re 20-odd grand. And the battery apparently needs fully replacing after not very many years at all. Doesn’t sound like a very logical thing to purchase whichever way you slice it, so seems likely that some form of hire purchase will very much be the way with fully electric cars, too.
Have read some interesting stuff about how driverless cars will more likely be something we’ll summon like taxis rather than buy to have all to ourselves. Makes sense, I suppose. A driverless car needn’t stay parked and less ‘downtime’ is more efficient. So probably likely that as well as more widespread car club pools there’ll be an AirBnB type setup, too, where richer individual private owners hire out their (other) car to plebs by the hour when they’re not using it. Insurance issues would need to be ironed out, I guess.
Blah. That unintentionally long and rambling post has drifted well away from the gist of the thread and into an alternative territory entirely. 
