Hacker News Reader

Comment by steven | Hacker News Reader

Writing this story, I got a good sense of the difference between silicon valley culture and auto industry culture (at a time when carmakers perceive the threat from tech companies and are trying, sort of, to be more nimble and tech-ish). Bill Ford is a great entry point because his heart is in the environment and innovation--but his soul runs on fossil fuel motors zipping down the highway. And now Ford (the company) is trying to get into services--and to take on Uber.

View on HN

As an auto enthusiast for a couple decades plus, I can really appreciate the approach and attitude Bill Ford seems to be reaching to achieve. The inventor and innovator side of me enjoys the often blase notion of "disruption" that comes with SV culture, but I've still got distinct reservations about the general "practical ethics compass" of the approach, to coin a phrase for lack of a better one that I know. Where SV and Auto culture meet in the middle definitely interests me.

I guess what I find more appealing about Auto industry culture is the general notion of accountability (give or take) with respect to products. Auto companies are not nimble, should not play 'fast and loose' with regulations like safety, and they have public shareholders as well. This is a different model - one that I honestly believe serves the Auto industry well - because there are perfectly reasonable avenues to take SV-like approaches - it's called R&D, and taking stuff out racing. WRC. BTCC. Le Mans. All sorts of different avenues!

This isn't to give Auto companies like Ford a free pass when they make mistakes (Firestone and Ford comes to mind) but rather acknowledge that there's still merit in their approach to creating, manufacturing, and supporting products.

Well said. I too would like to see Brick and Mortar models survive and thrive. SV speed and scale of disruption these days, is too quick for anyone's good. If we want more whales in the ocean we need larger oceans. We are getting very good at producing whales fast. We need to get better at producing more ocean.

He is sort of compelled here, the current generation or driver age people in the US have the much less desire to drive[1]. But like everyone they still need to get from A to B, and figuring out how they want to do that, and supplying that market is really the only choice auto makers have.

[1] http://uspirg.org/reports/usp/millennials-motion

Does anyone know what percentage of urban dwellers remain in the city for their lifetime? I would imagine this number tracks inversely to the decreasing birth rate YoY decline (among this same demographic group) in the US. Specifically, I'm interested in the birthrates for the 50-75th income percentile for living in major cities (not metropolitan areas).

A couple cursory Google searches hasn't yielded any hard data, but hopefully someone has come across data on this.

tldr; I don't disagree with your assumption for decreased ownership for personal transportation, but I don't see this changing for families that live outside the Urban core until decades from now.

I don't have an answer to your specific question but I do know ⅔ of all miles are driven in an urban environment in the USA. Urban is where the money is.

I believe that's only true if you include suburban miles under "urban", i.e., everything but rural. So that statistic really doesn't speak to karpodiem's comment about city dwellers:

> I'm interested in the birthrates for the 50-75th income percentile for living in major cities (not metropolitan areas).

Yes suburban is included however I strongly believe that the average suburban dweller will be more than catered for with self-driving taxis once we hit saturation point. During the service growth years it will probably be inconvenient but as soon as we reach maturity owning a car will be the inconvenience.

Sure, but I'd agree with karpodiem that this is likely decades from now, i.e., more than 20 years before half of suburban households drop their car for a autonomous taxi service. Computers took over a decade to really penetrate. 10% of people owned a computer 20 years ago, but no uses a self-driving car today. Further, the financial and regulator roadblocks are much larger for cars than computers.

It will take a while but perhaps now that everyone has a smartphone and is used to technology/ understands it's benefits, adoption rates will speed up.

Mr. Levy - do you see a parallel between Bill Ford and someone like Lou Gertsner? I wonder if Ford could have the same trajectory as IBM here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com