uber and lyft will obviously find new competition that has found new efficiencies and ways to operate with less profit
it's not hard to imagine a time when owning a vehicle is much more expensive than renting rides
think aircraft, flying commercial or renting a small plane is more economical than owning a plane and employing a pilot
I'm not sure aircraft is entirely a fair comparison, because of the insane acquisition cost and the limited usage model. Most people fly once or twice a year, if that. Most people drive almost daily. And the economics of ride-sharing don't scale quite as well, since even if you're doing something like an UberPool, you're not putting 150 people into a single vehicle, it's more like 2-4.
We are nearing a point when uber and lyft will near to raise fares and I would argue not marginally. They have much more pricing power and pressure now.
Lyft and Uber will fall in cost once they can fire their drivers with autonomous vehicles. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to destroy the car ownership model, which is their end goal.
The problem with Uber and Lyft is that to be profitable as companies, they need to rely on network effects in combination with exclusion. That exclusion could be a driver network that is either/or, i.e. an Uber driver can't simultaneously be a Lyft driver. Or that exclusion could be in luring *SO* many more drivers to their own service to overwhelm riders with convenience and low pickup times.
But so many drivers are driving for Uber and Lyft simultaneously, and they have no differentiation in their service to create exclusion. If nearly every rideshare car on the road has both the Uber and Lyft app open, there's no advantage to using one or the other regarding convenience. I have both the Uber and Lyft apps on my phone, and generally if I want to hail a ride I'm picking by random [or if one of them has a promotion].
So they have to compete with riders on price, and compete with drivers on pay. So Uber and Lyft both get squeezed as the middlemen because a rider will choose the lower-cost option and the driver will choose the option which gives them higher pay.
This gets better with autonomous vehicles, of course, *IF* the services own their own fleets. That gives them exclusion via network effects, because the larger fleet will be more convenient, more efficient [less driving between one rider to another because there are more users], and keeps their cars from being simultaneously used by the competing service.
So
that is why they want to move autonomous. Not just to fire their drivers, but to control the usage of their fleets such that the fleet isn't simultaneously driving for their competition. Granted, owning their own fleets will require INSANE capital, but it might just be worth it.