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Who will forego owning a car when Tesla’s ride-sharing service becomes available?
Picture this: no car payment, no car insurance, no circling the block looking for parking and no depreciation. Foregoing car ownership sounds pretty great. Why is it then that so many Americans insist on having a car? Simply stated: freedom.
Somewhere after the years of public transit, biking many miles or begging your parents for a ride, most of us got our own set of wheels. For some of us, it came in the form of a $900 death trap of a car that shook violently above 55 miles per hour. For others, an uncool but reliable toaster of a car. The car world as we have known it has always meant that unless you live and work in a major city with great public transportation, a personally owned vehicle is about the only convenient way to travel from point A to point B on a regular basis. This is especially true for families. If you’ve never been on a bus or subway with a baby in a stroller, spare yourself the circus. It’s also true depending on exactly which neighborhood you live in, even if you are in a major city. Taxicabs, where available, are far more convenient than public transportation, but certainly aren’t widely available outside of the most densely populated metro areas and at least to me, have always been cost prohibitive to use for any more than a special occasion. To reiterate the point, we all like freedom. And convenience. We like to go where we want to when we want to, without standing on a bus or watching a train timetable.
Ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber have upended the traditional taxicab model and, in many markets, undercut the price while providing a superior service. I certainly enjoyed riding in a flawlessly clean Kia Optima Hybrid Saturday night with a chatty and friendly driver far more than the high mileage, stale smelling, yellow Crown Vics that pass as taxis in Philly. The before and after experience are far better as well. Smart phone apps tell you who will be picking you up, in which kind of car, and exactly how far away they are. Cabs still require being flagged down and the joke’s on you when the 5th one passes you by with the “vacant” indicator light in use but passengers in the rear. Afterwards, you get notified that your credit card was charged in some amount that you had already been prepared for. In a taxi, you either pull out cash when you see the ever-surprising sum due or watch the driver give you an attitude for using their in-car credit card machine.
Trends are already developing among young adults to move into thriving urban areas, work nearby and pass up owning their own wheels. A lot of reasons contribute but the ease of using ride-sharing services is certainly one of them. What I’d like to explore here is whether or not this trend will grow – both among young adults as well as others – as autonomous vehicles come to market and bring with them the possibility that ride-sharing services will be even more common and affordable. I offer below a few categories of people and my assessment on whether or not they may give up a car in favor of autonomous vehicle ride-sharing.
TARGET: YOUNG, SINGLE, URBAN DWELLER. ANSWER: YES.
These folks are already the group that are giving up cars today, so surely they’ll continue to do so when that option becomes cheaper and even more widely available.
TARGET: YOUNG, SINGLE, ANYWHERE ELSE DWELLER; ANSWER: PROBABLY.
These folks will share many of attributes of those who forego car ownership today. They will, on average, have student loan debt to tackle and plenty of familiarity with smart phones.
TARGET: TWO ADULT HOUSEHOLD WITH NO KIDS. ANSWER: MAYBE.
This group of folks may be willing to forego one car in the household. Depending on their age and familiarity with today’s ride-sharing offerings, they could be the perfect target to give up one car. This demographic is the one I belong to. Having jobs in opposite directions makes owning two cars the most convenient option, but outside of the work commute, the second car never moves.
TARGET: TWO PARENT FAMILY. ANSWER: PROBABLY NOT.
Children are required to ride in car seats for quite a few years these days. For that reason alone, I would imagine ride-sharing to be more trouble than it’s worth. If, like the two-adult household with no kids one car is solely used as a commuter, that one could probably be given up. But the way I understand today’s modern family to work, either parent has to be ready to spring into action with little notice if daycare gets shut down due to snow or Junior gets sick in school.
TARGET: MATURE ADULTS. ANSWER: HOPEFULLY.
This is where I’d really like to see ride-sharing take off. If you are fortunate enough to make it to old age, your eyes or reflexes may not join you in their youthful form. The mature adults I’ve been close with have all wanted to continue driving beyond the point that in their individual circumstances, was probably wise. I get it. Freedom. When you’re a feisty octogenarian with an old habit of going to the grocery store daily (a holdover for the decades when you hid your smoking habit from everyone) it must be impossible to imagine yourself sans keys. If we can invent these cars, surely we can also invent easy ways of calling one up for a customer who isn’t particularly interested in owning or operating a smart device. (A telephone dialing service, perhaps – especially helpful for those with vision problems.)
AS FOR ME?
I just got done telling my better half that due to his short commute and our never using our second car outside of the work day, we could easily ditch car number two and have him Uber to work. The conversation was short-lived, as I have the longer commute and he has no interest in handing over the Model S fob to me on a permanent basis. In theory though, might it work? Yes. Would I end up doing it? Probably no. I’d be more inclined to owning an autonomous Tesla and letting it work for me such that the overall cost of owning and operating it was comparable to using a ride-sharing service in place of owning one.
The why is simple: freedom.
News
Tesla’s surprise Roadster video hints the 2017 design is gone
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
News
SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
SpaceX finished Starship’s Flight 14 rehearsal, clearing the way for its first orbital flight Monday.
SpaceX has cleared one of the last hurdles before Starship’s first trip to orbit. The company posted on X Thursday afternoon that its launch rehearsal for Flight 14 was complete, keeping the mission on track for Monday, September 28. The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT at Starbase, Texas, and runs for 75 minutes.
A wet dress rehearsal is essentially launch day without the launch. Crews fill Booster 21 and Ship 41 with thousands of tons of extremely cold propellant, run the countdown nearly to ignition, then drain everything back out. It lets engineers catch leaks or equipment problems before anything leaves the pad. SpaceX still needs a launch license from the FAA before the stack, which stands 407 feet tall, can fly.
Flight 14 matters because of where it is going. All 13 previous Starship flights followed a suborbital path, which works like throwing a ball extremely high and far: the vehicle reaches space, but it is always on a course that brings it back down within about an hour. This time, Ship 41 will perform a short engine firing called an orbital insertion burn roughly 25 minutes after liftoff, giving it enough speed to keep falling around Earth instead of back into it. SpaceX plans about six laps at an altitude near 275 kilometers (171 miles) over nearly 10 hours, as Teslarati detailed when the mission was first announced.
Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 24, 2026
Getting into orbit also means Starship has to prove it can get back out. The ship must relight a single Raptor engine in space to slow down for reentry. SpaceX says it will only attempt the orbital insertion burn after flight controllers confirm the hardware needed for that return burn has enough backup, and its flight plan includes health checks that could shorten the mission to two or five orbits.
Flight 14 is also the first to put working satellites into service. Flight 13 carried 20 Starlink V3 satellites in July, but they came back down with the ship because that mission never reached orbit. This time, 26 V3 satellites are meant to stay up and join the constellation within a few weeks. Together they add about 26 terabits per second of network capacity, which SpaceX says is roughly 10 times what a single Falcon 9 launch of older V2 Mini satellites adds. Three of them carry cameras that will photograph Starship’s heat shield in orbit to check for tile damage before reentry.
The hardware has changed too. Ship 41 flies with extra fasteners on tiles in the most vulnerable areas, fixes for gaps where superheated plasma slipped behind tiles, and curved tiles designed to reduce heating between them. Two tiles recovered from Ship 40 will fly again, the first reuse of any part of a Starship heat shield. Booster 21 carries better engine filtering and new relight software after ice clogged three center engines on the previous booster, leaving only eight of 13 engines to restart for its landing burn.
Ship 41 is targeting a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a new recovery zone after several Indian Ocean landings, while Booster 21 aims for the Gulf. Neither will be caught by the tower on this flight. Elon Musk said in August that a ship catch was likely “in a few months.”
Tesla’s surprise Roadster video hints the 2017 design is gone
Tesla Full Self-Driving release in the EU gets delayed
