See my more recent post. Yes, EVs have a higher sticker price. But their total cost of ownership is already completely competitive, but many people can't get their brain to think about TCO.

Fixed route is a reasonable baby-step, but it's not much of a goal. Fixed route duplicates what humans do, but saves some cost of a driver (but runs into other problems, like no driver on board to keep passengers behaved, or clean, etc.) Transit drivers are a large expense of transit agencies (because often they get vehicles with grants) but generally, the larger the vehicle, the lower cost of the driver per passenger, and so the lesser gain for doing this.

Self-driving isn't about simply saving money. It's about enabling new things that were not possible before. Saving money can do that - ie. you can now have a shuttle that runs all day and twice as often when you could not afford the drivers -- but that's a simple start of what the real change is.

Note, please change your name from Anonymous, and also it's annoying to mangle the URLs. I realize anti-spam filters may discourage URLs and that's a hard problem to solve. Those who ask for a pseudonym account can get access to better ability to insert formatting and URLs.