Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>> Are cars going to be (even more) commoditised

Self driving cars as a service are much better deal for the consumer. And they'll be more commoditized[1], same as taxis are, from the consumer perspective. On the other hand, building the car with the highest reliability , and the lowest cost of operation , is a hard challenge.

But: if electric cars are going to win, cars may become mostly batteries on wheels, so a lot of power will go to the battery companies, maybe even to the point they'll build the cars(like Samsung is working on).

And about Tesla: a lot of it's value is about brand. cars as a service kill branding(if everybody transports with a Tesla,it's nothing special) . Maybe that's one reason why they don't want their vehicle as a service.

[1]One thing i'm curious about : is taxi sharing realistic in a world of self-driven cars ? one guess: to make it viable, someone would have to build cars that are both shareable, but offer privacy for each of the passengers. And actually, this doesn't require self-driving to offer great value, so i wonder why aren't we seeing work on this?

Sharing isn't viable. I don't want my 20 minute taxi/CaaS ride to become 30+ minutes as we drive off my route to pick up another rider (and wait for them to come downstairs, pick their way across the slush, close their umbrella, and FINALLY get in the god damn cab)

> Sharing isn't viable. I don't want my 20 minute taxi/CaaS ride to become 30+ minutes as we drive off my route to pick up another rider

I drive for Uber part time and the majority of riders do choose the POOL option so I think you're wrong here.

Uber says Pool is at 20+% of the rides. Huh, I stand partially corrected!

I think most people would prefer no delays and a private ride. But the savings of pooling is too large for many to ignore.

So you mean, most people absolutely do prefer no delays and a private ride, since the other ~80% of Uber riders don't do the POOL option.

The market exists for both though. It's a smart move to offer this option. It's more energy economical and fiscally responsible. There's certainly even people who have the time but not the money.

Pool is not an option everywhere (even in the same city). In areas where it is available it represents a majority of my trip requests.

a shared ride has to have at least two occupants. With 4 passengers on average, 20% shared rides would mean 50% of user.

The Uber Pool service doesn't require you to actually be matched. If there doesn't happen to be another rider going in the same direction, you still get the cheaper fare and it's counted as an Uber Pool ride.

Pool also appears to be the default option now, so I on a recent trip accidentally got a pool a couple times. I didn't know the first time, and forgot the second.

Second time was also a 'pool' with no additional riders, so it was a happy accident for a cheaper ride. Perhaps people bet on that as well?

If we're imagining a pleasant future where self-driving cars have solved congestion, isn't some kind of car pooling going to be necessary?

It's fundamentally silly for millions of commuters to each travel in their own car, and robot cars aren't going to fix that. Buses make massively more efficient use of road space (when they're reasonably full, anyway).

Robot cars should reduce accidents, and parking problems will go away, but they won't magically reduce congestion on commuter routes. But car-pooling will.

Valid point, car pooling would definitely be a good thing. And I think people would be more willing if it was more efficient than it is. Uber Pool does not seem to match people very well. Scheduled rides could probably be very optimized, so its two minutes out of the way, for each person, and no one really minds. Also optimizations like, if the rider isn't there yet, don't even go for them and pass them on to the next car. Definitely plausible, but a pain in current formats.

You just described a bus.

Something like Uber for buses would be great!

Imagine an existing excellent bus network, like London's, but with completely dynamic routes, and a variety of bus sizes suitable for different times of day. Open the app and tell it where you're going, and it tells you which bus stop and bus number you need.

Uber tried this in Toronto already (called Uber Hop). I believe they had to stop as it is illegal to compete with the municipal bus system eyeroll.

https://newsroom.uber.com/canada/meet-uberhop/

Not quite. Buses have fixed static routes. I described dynamic routes optimized to minimize delays for all users, while being picked up and dropped off at the exact address they want to be at, rather than some static bus stop.

> If we're imagining a pleasant future where self-driving cars have solved congestion, isn't some kind of car pooling going to be necessary

Maybe, maybe not. Small one-person "pod" cars that link up into road trains automatically are also a possibility, and have basically the same benefit for congestion as sharing without actually sharing the same pod.

That could work, but I'd bet against it! In the medium term at least.

It would be a big R&D problem to make it work at all. Even if it worked, is a train like that really going to be as efficient as a bus? And finally, even if those obstacles are overcome, it seems like everyone has to buy the same model (or at least compatible models, and who's going to make that happen?) to get decent economies of scale.

On the other hand -- in-flight refueling is a kind of similar problem that sounds similarly unlikely, but actually works!

On the other other hand, that's a very specialized (and I'm guessing very expensive) system that isn't used by commercial airlines. I think pod-trains will go roughly the same way.

Though, with a self driving car sharing would not necessarily mean you both need to use it at the same time. The car could pick you up, drive your 20 minutes, then drive to the other person on its own and drive their 20 minutes. "Serial sharing" not "parallel"

> someone would have to build cars that are both shareable, but offer privacy for each of the passengers

The type of sharing you are writing about is not what the comment I was replying to was writing about.

I agree FWIW and I think you'll see CaaS co-operatives start up.

> I think you'll see CaaS co-operatives start up

That's assuming that autonomous cars as a product (rather than a service) enter the free market at all.

Most of people outside the 5% value cash over times. I've seen a lot of people begin to use UberPool in India who would have earlier commuted by partly open and definitely unsafe motor rickshaws. With pooling, they get an air conditioned car ride.

In Honiara, moderately well off people will own a car and then lease* it to a taxi driver so that it can make them money throughout the day. It works out really well if you need to get your kids to school, as the taxi driver will take them or pick them up without disrupting your work commute.

I think it depends where you live. In a dense city like New York existing pool services work very well indeed - the diversion to pick up is usually brief, and the savings considerable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com