Will consumers largely abandon car ownership in the next ten years in favor of fleets of autonomous vehicles for hire? John Zimmer, president and co-founder of ride-sharing app Lyft, certainly thinks it will in major US cities in the next ten years, and mapped out his vision in a recently-published essay. He deplores how the layout of cities has been warped to accommodate not just cars, but parked cars, noting that “the average vehicle is used only 4% of the time and parked the other 96%.” Think Zimmer’s vision of the future is too rosy, given regulatory opacity, and the recent news that Uber lost an estimated c.USD 1 bn (autoplay video) in 1H16? Well, at least with regard to regulations, the US federal government yesterday just made its strongest endorsement of the long-term safety benefits of autonomous vehicles, with the US Department of Transportation issuing a 15-point safety standard for the design and development of autonomous vehicles (top link opens a pdf download). The guidelines open with the endorsement: “DOT [Department of Transportation] and NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] policy is to facilitate and encourage wherever possible the development and deployment of technologies with the potential to save lives.” (Read The third transportation revolution)