Two ways to get these numbers. Consider the total miles driven, divided by cost of the car. Or consider the cost of a taxi if you don’t own a car.

I believe uber says their average cost per mile is roughly $1. So maybe $2 in urban areas. Waymo is $3 they said.

I saw some statistic that said a new car costs $800 a month now. Since we’re talking about selling new manual vs self driving cars, we can ignore people buying used cars or particularly cheap cars.

If you own a car in a city, you might drive to get groceries once a week and you may drive to a furniture store once every few years, and you take a couple trips to the airport every year. Cost city dwellers walk or take transit. Cities are dense, so the grocery store may be 2mi a way, so roughly 200mi a year, and then maybe 200mi a year for everything else. That’s 400mi a year (or 8mi/wk) with a car that statistically costs $800/mo in America - or 200/wk, so it actually costs $25/mi.

In the suburbs, you may drive 20mi round trip to the grocery store. Then 20mi a day round trip to commute, then 5mi a trip to a restaurant… it adds up to a lot more miles total. I googled it and the average American drives 1200mi/mo. That’s $1.5/mi assuming the same average $800/mo cost of a new car.

That means it’s cheaper for an urban dweller to take uber or Waymo instead of buying a new car. It’s almost but not quite cheaper for a suburbanite to take an uber but definitely not a Waymo.