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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff.

I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment:

Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why?

All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicles will bring to the world of transit basically boils down to a model that's a mixture between taxi service and (really crappy) bus service, both of which exist today and have existed for several decades--and basically predate the automobile when you think about it. Yet somehow self-driving vehicles are supposed to completely change the mix of transit use when it's not really adding any capability changes. So I'm genuinely curious as to what the magic sauce is that makes people so giddy for this future.

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I can't add anything profound, but I will say that 40+ years ago I camped at Disney's Ft. Wilderness campground, with all my many brothers and sisters. The electric trams had a routine schedule that came around and stopped almost in front of your campsite, all of kids would simply jump on, go to anywhere in the park like the stores, the showers, the outdoor theater, and hop off again. It was incredibly liberating and fun, our parents didn't have to be involved, we could go where and when we wanted. It was fun. I know, childishly silly, right? Just a way of getting people around a big place? Also called a Bus? No, not really as buses don't go where all the people live. Transportation was a critical part of Disney's attempt at showing how his futuristic communities would work. Now whether those specific trams were directly part of that, I dunno. But it did make your community activities, events, places, much larger and much more accessible, efficiently, and no worries on parking, maintenance. I have never forgotten that feeling of ease and efficiency of movement and freedom, and I saw that promise echoed in the Waymo video.

> No, not really as buses don't go where all the people live.

They do, though, you just haven't been to places where this is standard. Try finding a place that's more than 10 minutes walk from public transit: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Warsaw,+Poland/

No, I have been to many places in Europe and was amazed at the places they did go; schoolkids into the Alps for their skiing lessons, for example. I meant here in the US where bus service is mostly an urban experience, as well as underground/trains.

On a first try: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Ruczaj+40,+02-997+Warszawa,+...

Look again!

They have fricking helipad that takes them to the bus stop!

This is what New York still feels like to me, 4 years after moving here. Don't own a car, hope I never have to.

It's one of my favorite things about living in NYC...

Yes. Having moved from a country that lacks good public transport to one that does some years ago I had exactly the same experience. People tend to judge from experience (and why would you not) and I'm guessing many Americans simply have not experienced the freedom that you get by being car-free.

Yes, but Disney never solved the problem of how expensive it is to run that service -- they just got people to pay. Will self-driving cars be cheap enough? They save money on the driver, but cost money in the automation hardware and security against vandalism/theft.

I think that's the key. Without the driver and gas costs, it should be as cheap as a public bus, but taking you from front door to front door.

Most of the cost of a taxi service is in wages to the human driver. With an autonomous car, you don't have the driver, so the service can be cheaper (especially with electric cars). I lived for about a year without a car, using Uber instead. But when I tallied my Uber usage, it ended up being about $600 per month. So I got a car instead and saved a lot of money. If this could be reduced to $200 - $300 per month, it would have been a different matter entirely.

I think you're basically agreeing with the parent. Like Zipcar and Uber, autonomous vehicle technology when it's eventually available will almost certainly be one more incremental step toward enabling reduced personal car ownership in edge cases.

> and have existed for several decades

Except that they are not really cheap, safe, or convenient. They are not door to door. Public bus/trains run at their own scheduled time, not at my desired time. Even services like Uber involve humans who are more concerned about their profit than my schedule or preferences, so they cancel rides when I need them the most because some other ride is more profitable for them. Moreover in countries like India where road accidents are the highest in the world, rash and unsafe driving is a big problem (government run bus, car drivers or private ones). This can just wipe that out! So personally, I'm super excited about this future.

I think that people who believe that private car ownership will fall are those who live in the urban centres and have little understanding of the needs and living styles of rural or suburban population. It could just as well be that the opposite will happen, because cars will suddenly become much more accessible for people who can't or don't know how to drive.

Or even those who live in urban centers but like to get out of them on weekends and vacations. I've tried living for years in western US cities both with and without a car. Going without was much cheaper, and I managed to find entertainment and not starve, but getting a car vastly improved my quality of life. Trains and an occasional rental would probably have worked nearly as well in parts of Europe, but the US just has too much empty space between interesting places.

Who says you can't take an automated rental car to more remote locations?

> It could just as well be that the opposite will happen, because cars will suddenly become much more accessible for people who can't or don't know how to drive.

This is important to note. I'm on those margins, and have been saving for my first automatic car for ages. I live in a mildly rural community, and don't wanna wait for uber or whatever to deploy autonomous cars here.

> those who live in the urban centres

Per the 2010 US census, over 80% of the US population lives in urban areas.

uh huh. and just what is the definition of urban area?

It's a definition in the census. I find it somewhat disappointing to see such a dismissive response when the answer is so easy to find.

Here's a link to the definitions of urban and rural: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_urbanrural.html

Here's the 2010 figures for the split between the urban and rural: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.htm...

I think the point was that the "urban area" definition in the census was quite broad. I live in an "urban area" on a decent plot of land with a Christmas tree farm on one side and a working farm/apple orchard on the other. Probably not what most people think of as urban.

My parent's house has an orange orchard in front of it, a wilderness area behind it, but Uber rides from downtown are still only $11, and everyone I know who lives in that town now uses Uber instead of driving. DUIs are way down. Nightlife is better, etc. etc. This is a very real 'urban' situation.

It is relatively broad, but the point is that it's based on population size and density. The fact that you live next to a farm and an orchard doesn't change the fact that you live near lots of other people.

I suppose it depends on your definition of near. I'm about an hour drive from a major city. Less so to smaller urban areas that have no significant public transit. No it's not the wilds of Wyoming but most people here probably wouldn't consider being on a 100 acres or so with a couple of other houses being near lots of other people.

Yes, but they don't necessarily need to own them. They could call a ride from a lot 10 minutes away whenever they need one.

From a personal perspective, if you could easily pre-schedule a self-driving car, and the reliability was very good (it's basically there when you need it), it would increase the convenience factor by a lot. From my perspective I'd be encouraged to reduce the cars in my household from 2 to 1 if this was available -- I would probably use this type of service for any sort of situation where I have a pretty good idea of when and where I'll use the car.

Taxi service exists, but the reliability factor is very poor right now (in that you call and you have to wait n minutes, where n sometimes is a very large number). I see Uber is rolling out a pre-scheduled service and I wonder how good this has been so far for the markets that have it. This would basically be the same thing only with human drivers.

I don't think this pattern works for rural areas and all situations. I also envision some nostalgia and/or tech discomfort keeping the car ownership pattern going for a while. Still, I am wondering if there are a lot of 2+ car families that would be in the same boat. Even drastically reducing the 2+ car families will drop vehicle demand.

I have two kids. They need car seats. We often haul stuff between home and the in-laws. This makes perma-Ubering infeasible.

We need a radically new car seat design, either:

1. Super portable and quick to install/remove, or

2. Built into the car, safe for all ages, easily extended/retracted.

With a huge fleet of self-driving cars, there would be enough capacity to have permanently configured cars for child seats, bike racks, dog areas, etc.

eg. "I need a 4wd vehicle for 2 adults and 2 bikes to take me to X park at 10am tomorrow."

Not without seriously increasing the costs for car rental.

The cost savings for car rental are predicated on increased utilization. Increased utilization is predicated on each car having more people using it on any given day. And these things don't scale infinitely -- each car can only serve a particular locality.

The number of variations that you propose is a fast geometric progression. Kids 0-12 months or so need different car seats from kids 12mo to about 3y need different car seats for older kids. The idea that you could support high utilization on "I want a car that has already installed a carseat for a 1-2year old + a carseat for a 5 year old plus a bike rack" is nuts.

(Regardless, also, parents carry a mountain of stuff that's THEIRS. The heck with a car seat, I need board books, toys, snacks, and wipes in the car.)

> The number of variations that you propose is a fast geometric progression.

Only if you're an engineer. To a marketing person, you bundle groups of features together and price them at various tiers.

Er, I wasn't talking about pricing complexity, I was talking about the ability to actually get the vehicle that meets your needs. It doesn't do you any good to know that "a vehicle with three or more constraints costs $1.50/mile" if you get a vehicle whose three constraints are "4WD, Bike rack, Dog area" when what you wanted was "carseat1, carseat2, large storage area."

And if the fleet can successfully meet arbitrary needs around constraints, then the fleet is going to be heavily overprovisioned, and thus expensive.

But the fleet is heavily overprovisioned now. We're just used to absorbing the costs of the overprovisioning. But the vast majority of Uber rides (or of passenger vehicle travel generally, really) don't require five seats, don't require trunk space, etc. We just equip cars standard with these configurations for the small fraction of trips that actually require them. In some sense self-driving cars should actually reduce overprovisioning by letting single-occupant trips use smaller vehicles (and hey, in a pinch, cars with bike racks on them work just as well carrying people without bikes, just like five-person cars can carry a single person alright).

Car rental companies already manage this quite handily. Roughly speaking: economy, midsize, full size, SUV, 4WD SUV.

"4WD, Bike rack, Dog area" -> 4WD SUV.

You'll probably have to snap on your own accessories (kayak/ski/bike rack) when the vehicle arrives. Or if you order in advance, you can pay extra to have a specific accessory configuration prepared and set up for you (vehicle drives itself to local servicing point to get configured).

Once you are at your activity point it goes to grab your hot meal and meets you at the other side of your hike.

I would like that.

Perhaps a fleet of self-driving cars could reconfigure on-demand.

e.g. Customer orders a self-driving car with 1 infant car seat. A robot bolts-in a modular infant car seat at the depot and sends it off.

I've wondered whether some of this would lead to a personal "pod" like thing. I am happy buying a box with comfy seats and a TV and kids seats, etc.

But I don't need or want to buy a wheel, batteries, cameras, lasers, etc. Those also should be upgraded as technology gets better but my box doesn't really need to be anything but a box.

So what if I could sit in my box and have a transporter thing come over and clip onto me and take me away? You could have child seats and I could have a lazyboy chair, or I might need 8 seats and you need storage space.

This would then let the actual transporters take other types of cargo too, rather than having a people vs items split. It would allow a pony-express style swapover rather than needing huge range in a single one. It would even allow completely different types of transport, what if my pod could just be clipped onto a big train and whip me to the other side of europe?

This would all likely have other downsides, but is a fun thing to think about.

TL;DR shipping containers

How about making your existing car self driving? Your stuff is always there in the trunk, but when you're not using it, it joins the fleet and earns you some money.

I really want to see a day, where I drive my car to work. It then drives other people around and picks me when I am finished.

Retrofitting self driving system -- Nice idea!!!

The initial idea of Cruise

Convertible car seats can handle kids from 5 pounds to 65 pounds (like the Britax Marathon). That handles from newborn to 5+ years old.

You don't need drastically different car seat.

1. is never happening. If you want a proper safe car seat for a 1-3 year old, it's going to weigh 30-40 lbs no matter what sintered pixie dust you build it from. And it has to be pretty huge since a small person has to fit almost inside it.

Even the ones for babies, that people for some reason I can't fathom like to carry around in the supermarket, are actually also 20+ lbs, you've just left 15 lbs remaining in the car occupying a seat while you're shopping. And they're also bulky.

2. could happen for children aged 4+ in a minivan-sized car. I've already seen it on some long distance buses. For younger kids however, they really need to sit facing rearward, but also must be well protect against side impacts, so it's very tricky to make something retractable that doesn't take a huge amount of space.

> Even the ones for babies, that people for some reason I can't fathom like to carry around in the supermarket, [...]

These are awesome because you can take your sleeping baby out of the car, carry them with you without waking them up, and put them back in the car without waking them up. Shopping is 10x faster this way than when you have to spend most of your time comforting/distracting an awake and fussy baby.

Maybe I'm spoiled with sleepy kids, but we would just go get one of the shopping carts with a baby seat on, lift baby from car seat to shopping cart seat (95% success rate for not waking baby), go shopping while actually having space for stuff in the cart.

> I've already seen it on some long distance buses

Can we apply some if this science for making car seats for taller people. I am so unhappy when seat ends midway of my thigh or shoulders ram into headrest (mostly airplane problem).

You are over estimating car seat weights. A large, one piece, high end seat for kids up to 70 pounds like a Britax Marathon only weighs 19.5 pounds. No pixie dust needed, just plastic and styrofoam.

https://us.britax.com/car-seats/marathon-70/ (see specifications)

Those detachable seats you see mom's carrying in the supermarket weigh about 10 pounds, and the base will be about the same.

The one you link to is a) not ISOFIX, thus not high end, and b) discontinued from the manufacturer.

We have this one, which is what I'd consider the gold standard. It's ISOFIX, and only rearward-facing since kids under 4 should not be facing front, and it's won basically every test there is:

http://www.besafe.com/product-int/izi-kid-x2-i-size/

It weighs 40.6 lbs. Quite a bit of structural steel in there, including a full integral roll bar and a brace against being rear-ended, both of which your linked Britax seat lacks.

Also bloody expensive, but if there's one thing I won't skimp on, it's the safety of my children.

ISOFIX doesn't define high end it is just the name of the European standard. The US decided to go with a different standard called LATCH. Britax is high end, and the Marathon is their largest safest seat, and it weighs 19.5 pounds.

https://us.britax.com/car-seats/marathon/https://us.britax.c...

So maybe in Europe you are going to have a harder time with self driving cars because you need heavier car seats, but you'll probably find a workable compromise. Yu can just build your base into the center seat or something.

I don't have kids, but friends who do have strollers where the seat is a removable car seat.

Would Ubering with something like this work?

Like I said, assuming your friends have a proper high-safety Isofix seat, those removable car seats are only 1/3 of the whole seat, 2/3 are left permanently in the car.

Don't see why not. Just make sure they have accessible ISOFIX (UAS) connectors and it'd be very straightforward.

I think this claim is making the assumption that self driving cars will be much more accessible and available than taxis/Ubers today. Where I live (in the suburbs) I can't rely on an Uber being available at any time I would want to go somewhere, and taxis only exist at the airport. If I could count on a car showing up at any time, anywhere I might go after a short but predictable wait time, I would definitely ditch my car. But the current options available to me don't allow for that. I don't want to own a car - I feel like I have to.

Also, cost is another big factor. I would also assume that taking a self driving car would be a smaller expense than owning for the average user.

Ridesharing currently requires human drivers which limits them to where the drivers want to be and limits them to how many drivers are in your area.

When human drivers are not required you have neither of these problems. It will be significantly easier for ridesharing companies to provide availability in non-dense areas.

Hell, they'll be able to control where these vehicles go by algorithm, so it will simply be a matter of adding more vehicles to their fleet and the algorithm will take care of minimizing response time for everyone.

Why would ride sharing companies behave diffrently than human drivers. I don't think laws of economics will change.

It takes time to sign up human drivers and onboard them. Buying new cars can be done in bulk at scale.

Also, you can easily send a car from one city to another. A human driver needs to get home to their family. You can't just say "drive to Miami and work there for three weeks".

Also, simply decreasing the cost per mile by cutting labor costs makes further flung areas more accessible. You can't sell a $10 ride if it costs $10 just to pay someone to drive to the area and back. But if it costs $4 to send a car, that ride becomes financially viable.

Cause they are competing with anyone with a car. That makes margins a fair bit lower.

Self-driving taxis are in principle way cheaper to operate than human-driven taxis. They never have to stop, they can operate at all hours, there's no cost to pay drivers, and if they do stop they can do it somewhere very cheap.

And when self-driving cars are a viable option, insurance will strongly encourage it. And by strongly encourage it I probably mean "absurdly high fees for driving your own car", because people are much worse drivers. Which should drive up the price of car ownership significantly. The increased cost to car storage in populated areas will probably lag a long while behind, so the second cliff will be much slower to hit.

This is a frequent argument I keep seeing about the cost of insurance rising as autonomous vehicles are introduced. There's no reason they'll rise past what they're currently charging; insurance takes into account current risk. In the future, the risk if anything should decrease.

The risk may decrease but liability may increase, as this is a risk you are taking deliberately if you decide to drive your car instead of getting a safe self driving car like everybody else.

Insurance doesn't work that way. Liability isn't an ephemeral concept, it's the chance of a claim X the amount of a claim, pooled in a group of buyers with differing risks. The relative cost of insurance compared to an autonomous vehicle should increase, but not the dollar amount.

Car accidents kill people. The amount of those claims is not fixed and will increase when every fatality can lead to a wrongful death civil case.

I can buy cars with better safety systems being cheaper to insure, whether you're talking assistive driving systems or something more. But why would the existence of cars with better systems make driving vehicles like most people own today more expensive than currently?

> But why would the existence of cars with better systems make driving vehicles like most people own today more expensive than currently?

Safer options will, as they become available, be disproportionately chosen by the safety conscious. This can, potentially, make the less-safe legacy option more dangerous (per use) than before the safer option became available, because the safest users of the less-safe option before the new one are users of the new option afterward, and no longer bringing the average risk of the old option down.

Conversely, if a significant proportion of the cars on the road are autonomous and safer than human-driven cars, then the accident rate for everyone could decline, making insurance cheaper for both autonomous and human-driven cars.

Wouldn't that make insurance cheaper for autonomous cars and more expensive for human-driven cars since humans would be more of a liability behind the wheel?

The comparison isn't between cars with assistive/autonomous systems and those without. It's between cars without those systems some decades hence and those without such systems today. Why should the existence of such systems make driving by humans more expensive than it is today?

Not necessarily. You could equally argue that self-driving cars will be more popular among bad drivers.

letting humans drive cars is insane. i'm not paying into your insurance pool.

I own a car in India, because there are no other means to get to where I want to, when I want to. I now live in Singapore and I absolutely don't feel the need for a car. That said, I am not incredibly happy with the public transportation here. It's still slow - takes about 35-40 mins to cover 10 km door to door. It's not possible to haul kids and luggage in public transit. Self driving cars address these shortcomings. They are door-to-door. I rent a seat when I am travelling alone, or rent the entire car when I"m traveling with family. I'm dead certain that traditional car companies are screwed. Just look at the driving license stats in the US. The number of millenials getting a driving license is dramatically decreasing.

> Yet somehow self-driving vehicles are supposed to completely change the mix of transit use when it's not really adding any capability changes.

Self-driving vehicles could be at your door within a 1 minute timeframe (say). That's a huge change, and will nullify the benefits of owning a car.

Of course, this will be possible because driverless taxi companies will have the logistics in place to make this happen (they know where every car is, and they can compute where to send empty cars to increase the capacity).

I can imagine that a cheaper service will offer the same but, say, in 5 minutes.

Also, you will never have to find a parking spot, which may be an even better argument.

> will nullify the benefits of owning a car

Except I like owning my car. I can take it where I want. When I need it, I have it. I can leave my stuff in it if I want to (e.g. if I decide to go to the park for the day I can leave my coat in the car if it is warm). If it's pouring rain I don't have to wait, I can just get in it and go.

I can't wait to have a self driving car it would be even more convenient than a regular car. I gues some people just don't see the utility in cars other than getting from point A to point B. I also love to own a car for same reasons as you do and also for a bunch other personal preferences which are not possible when i have to take a ride in somebody else's car. Just as i prefer sleeping in my own bed, watching my TV in my own living room on my own couch, using my own toilet rather than using a public toilet, i prefer driving/being driven in my own car where i have my things available.

If you are using your car like a giant purse, then I'm afraid all is lost :)

Taxis suck and busses suck. Self driving cars have the potential to give you the benefits of the taxis and busses without as many downsides. Not sure what more you'd need to understand why folks are excited about this.

Not having to own, insure, maintain, or park a car. End to end transportation with no transfers that allows you to internet while you travel. Cheaper than human driven cabs (presumably).

Different usecases drive different needs. If you live in the suburbs, it's easier to own a car than to get an Uber and wait for 20 minutes every time you are going out. If you live in the city, it's cheaper to set aside money for Uber than to pay for a car and a parking spot.

Also, getting a driver has never been this easy. Taxis have existed for hundreds of years, but smartphones are a recent invention. There's a huge difference between calling a phone number and trying to setup a rendezvous than the current workflow on Uber or Lyft, that literally takes 10 seconds from the moment I unlock my phone.

Before Uber, the taxi company I used had an automated system which send a taxi to my place if I pressed 1, and connected me to human that took a new address when I pressed 2. Even with a human in the loop, it rarely took more than 40 seconds. I agree that Uber app is more convenient than that, but it really wasn't an order of magnitude improvement -- what was a deal maker for me was the fact that Uber automatically charged me, and I didn't have to put a card in and input PIN, or scramble for cash.

I own one now because there is no decent public transport in Dallas. I would sell it in a heartbeat if we have better public transport or if Ride Sharing services (with human drivers or autonomous) get cheaper.

> So I'm genuinely curious as to what the magic sauce is that makes people so giddy for this future.

I think the magic sauce is utilization. A fully autonomous car's utilization rate can be close to 100%.

Higher utilization --> same demand for mobility hours/miles can be satisfied with fewer vehicles --> ceteris paribus, fewer vehicles sold every year.

Viewed through this lens, it seems inevitable that, in equilibrium (ie once the non-autonomous to autonomous fleet transition is complete) annual per-capita demand for vehicles will be lower with the advent of fully autonomous cars.

> A fully autonomous car's utilization rate can be close to 100

So if every car is almost always at 100% how am I going to be able to instantly get a car on demand from my suburban mcmansion?

I have to agree with you skepticism. Let's e.g. replace "car" with "apartment". Imagine an apartment where you pay a premium to have all the cooking, cleaning and maintenance done for you. This obviously exists today, yet >99% of people don't use it.

I believe people like owning things, and using them to do stuff. This is a basic fact of being human. Probably goes right back to the stone age. I doubt autonomous cars will change that pattern.

> I believe people like owning things... This is a basic fact of being human

There are some objects we enjoy forming a relationship with. Your favorite kitchen knife. Your bed. Your sports car you take out on the weekend.

There are other objects we just want to work. Your running shoes. Your daily commuting vehicle. Your dish rack.

Of course it varies from person to person which items fall in which category.

There will always be a market for people who want to own and fetishize a car. The same way there is a market for people who want to own and fetishize their record collection.

But it is usually a smaller market than the market for people who just want convenient access to the thing. I.e. Spotify.

Which will be bigger, Spotify for mobility, or your neighborhood hipster automobile dealer?

An apartment where cooking, cleaning and maintenance are done for you costs significantly more than the alternative. If it didn't, >99% would do so.

The idea is that a subscription car service is likely to be significantly cheaper than owning your own.

The connection to ownership works for things you operate. If I do my own laundry I want a nice washing machine, and I'll shop for one, upgrade on features, etc. Same for kitchen knives.

I have a maid who does my laundry so I don't care about my washing machine anymore. I still cook so I want good knives, but if my maid were to start cooking I'd stop caring.

I don't own a car, but sometimes I rent one. And when I do I almost always pay 2-3x for a sports car because it's fun.

When I use Uber, I never pay for the upgrade to a nicer car. I'm just going to read or fiddle with my phone, so I don't care about the car at all.

I predict the exact same behavior for autonomous cars. And why would I pay $25k for a car when I can get the same thing for $1 a ride (and not have to worry about parking or maintenance or upgrades to new models).

Hotel apartments attract a lot of wealthy dwellers. It's less expensive than having to pay your own full-time house staff.

Exactly, unless self driving cars become cheaper than taxis then what is the point?

They don't need to be cheaper, they need to deliver better service.

Depending on the city, better might be faster, more available, less racist, less intense experience, cleaner, etc, etc, etc.

They don't need to be cheaper in most places, at least not yet.

I thought that was the whole idea?

> Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why?

Yes.

There isn't a reliable taxi service or public transportation in most suburbs. Even if you have Uber in your town, it's much more expensive than owning/leasing a personal car.

I can't use Uber when I need to go to another town 50 miles away or 500 miles away.

Autonomous ride service could change that.

Honestly, I would love to have my own self-driving car that integrates with home robotics.

Imagine you leave your laptop at home... Just get your car to drive home, receive it robotically, and bring it to your location before your next meeting!

It would work just like Uber (even better), only you would own it. Every delivery company would be out of a ride the moment your car can go make restaurant pickups.

Well, if you have home robotics, what stops you from hiring a self driving service to fetch the laptop for you.

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