Automakers Prepare for an America That’s Over the Whole Car Thing

Also I think articles like this often forget that while it would be great to not need a car for the morning commute, people in suburbia still need to do many other things like shopping and fetching children etc.

Many of those tasks are just easier or more preferred to be done in personal transport. Sometimes you need to leave some shopping in the car while you go in to sit with the kids at an after school thing, before heading past a friends house to drop off their kids then finally heading home. A self driving fleet could probably still achieve that in multiple trips, but how many people want to deal with continuously pre-planning and concerting a half dozen small trips a day?

I strongly dislike suburbia and car culture does grind my gears in various ways, but I can't help but feel the car-in-an-app is solving the very specific problem of short once off trips, and solving that doesn't even come close to solving the nations transport issues.

There is currently no viable alternative to cars in the vast majority of the US.

An Uber fleet of SDCs would be gamechangingly better on both counts.

Have a variety of capacity vehicles, including full sized buses. Have bus stops and have people indicate where they are going, and set preferences (like "willing to accept a change for a discount" to allow better vehicle utilisation), and dynamically adjust the routes accordingly and use minibuses or smaller cars to "backfill" capacity to aim to guarantee that you can be picked up within a certain time.

Having fixed routes and scale up size of vehicles based on actual detailed drivership data would be very interesting.

I know from my own bus usage that having the certainty that there'll be a bus "soon enough" makes a big difference in how often I take the bus vs. when I'll order a car. If I know that if I go to the bus stop I'll get one or the other but guaranteed within a short time, it'd remove most of my need for ordering cars.

Also, it's not as if those empty unused private cars disappear when not in use. They take up vast amounts of public and private space in urban and suburban areas.

If electrical really is that efficient and maintenance free and cost effective, albeit a heavy investment, they should be employed in buses and taxis first. And long after that, in consumer cars that sit in the parking lot modt of the time.

SDC's still need to maintain a safe stopping distance. The problem is really the opposite, human drivers drive too close, causing bunching, traffic jams, and collisions.

In the area where I live (N. VA), there are already an astonishing (to me, anyway) number of people who drive an hour or more each way to work. 2+ hours a day of just piloting a car down the highway, frequently in heavy traffic. This isn't especially uncommon or anything -- it's not the majority (thankfully, due to all the externalities involved), but it's not rare either. People generally do it because it allows them to buy a significantly bigger/nicer/whatever-er house out in the exurbs than in the inner suburbs, for a given amount of money. I think it's an insane tradeoff, but people are already doing it.

If you didn't have to drive the car, and could basically reconfigure the car's interior to some sort of fully-reclining "pod" like the very high-end cabins of transcontinential airliners... it'd seem a lot less insane. I could imagine dragging myself up at oh-dark-thirty much more easily, if all I was doing was staggering from my bed to a vehicle, where I could pass back out until I was five minutes out from the office.

The afternoon commute would still be rough, because I don't really do naps, but a self-driving car would let you legitimately work from the road; it wouldn't be that hard to stack up a few hours of email, coding, or other non-face-to-face work to do on the way home.

All of a sudden, living in West Virginia and commuting to DC doesn't seem entirely impractical -- and that's probably a nasty problem for transportation infrastructure if a bunch of people all decide to try it in the near future.

But in rural areas, you'd have to wait too long for a centralized service's car to show up because of lack of economy of scale, and the larger distances it'd have to service. In theory, you could schedule them well ahead of time to arrive when needed, but that's far less convenient and the scale & distance will still significantly affect the price.

There are two issues that I think get talked about together, whenever the idea of self-driving cars comes up: self-driving cars themselves, and then self-driving cars as part of an Uber-like pooled vehicle business model.

I think that self driving cars as a technology are definitely on the horizon, and if they don't hit any major roadblocks (literally or figuratively...), some level of self-driving capabilities might become mandatory in the next couple of decades. It makes driving on freeways much safer, and also allows for types of interchanges that aren't possible with human drivers.

But the argument you sometimes hear tossed around, that self-driving cars will lead to Uber-like services displacing all or nearly all private car ownership... that strikes me as much more speculative. There are cultural-psychological aspects to car ownership, and I'm not convinced that the value proposition could be made sufficiently strong to cause people to not want to own their own car, while still creating a viable business for the pooling company, in a suburban or exurban (to say nothing of truly rural) area.

Owning a car in a dense city is a pain in the ass and a huge expense; owning a car in a rural area is basically a necessity to live as an independent adult. It'll be a lot harder to get people in that second group to switch to vehicle pooling than the people who probably detest having a car in the first place for all the expense and inconvenience it causes.

Plenty of families don't actually need N cars. They can probably get by with N-1 and summon another when needed.

Also, one car can do multiple errands without a driver, eg drop someone off at work, drop the kids off at school, and then go stage somewhere until needed.

And double basses, my situation. I commute to work, and could do most of my shopping, by bike. But playing music requires a car, for myself, and to schlep the kids to their music activities.

Still, I could see moving to a situation where I make much less use of a car. Maybe there's a way to request an Uber that's big enough for my instrument, and to pay a little extra for that. There are double bassists in NYC who get around by subway. And since most of my playing is local, I could get away with having an electric car with relatively low speed and range.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+big+is+texas+compared+to...

I saw the part about buying fewer cars, etc. But flying over NYC and the NYT at 20,000 feet and also from decades of history I concluded that the NYT was eager to draw their conclusion about "fewer cars," in LA, Boston, NYC, because -- right -- the NYT hates cars and likes to fabricate silly stories to grab eyeballs.

I did not address the idea that people will be buying fewer cars because that seems to me to be beyond absurd, in NYC, Boston, and especially LA, although for different reasons especially between NYC and LA.

Indeed, IMHO, a significant fraction of the cars being sold now will get dumped relatively soon -- causing people to buy more cars instead of fewer -- because of the long list of electronic this and that that will fail and need maintenance -- before the shocks, suspension bushings, engine, transmission, brakes, and corrosion problems -- but where owners will discover that in the car industry good maintenance on such electronics is difficult to find and expensive. Heck, one car repair guy thought that connecting my radio antenna might give him an electric shock! E.g., one bright guy I know with experience just flatly states "Never own a BMW out of warranty."

For car manufacturers looking into self driving cars, all electric cars, super small cars (pregnant roller skates), cars with solar panels on the roof, hydrogen powered cars, cars that burn corn stalks, cars with pedals for driving up hill, etc., sure, they have to stay informed. Maybe, maybe, maybe, against nearly all common sense, the NYT, etc. will talk enough people with enough money into buying goofy, far out cars, and in that case the car manufacturers want to be in position to sell such cars. No way can I believe that the big collection of goofy cars will become significant.

Uh, I'm a car nut, e.g., once was made a Full Member of the SAE. To me, finding anything at all realistic about cars in the NYT is like looking for Levi's 501 blue jeans on the runway of a NYC fashion show!

Or, the NYT is having fun saying that the cars they hate are on the way out. Wrong. The NYT is on the way out.

A car needs a quite significant supply of energy, and gasoline works great -- for a car, a 15 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to beat. The piston engines and automatic transmissions powered by gasoline have long since been highly refined and are tough to beat.

But much of NYC and essentially all of the NYT strongly hate cars and gasoline. Tennessee, Indiana, Maryland, Upstate NY, Ohio, ..., Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, etc. very much like both gasoline and cars that burn gasoline.

https://i.redditmedia.com/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2sV1yY46...

I blame the television and the media, they have sunk the population into a hypnotic stupor.