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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

> There are so many car makers, there is no monopole they could get. Same for solar and batteries.

The automobile industry will contract as we move from individual ownership to mobility. But along with that transition some manufacturers will keep up and others will not. Tesla is hoping to be one of the winners, taking perhaps 25% of the mobility market as the car buying market dries up.

Tesla's valuation is also based on the idea that clean energy will replace fossil fuels. If that happens, the battery market will grow by orders of magnitude. Tesla will basically take the market from coal and petroleum.

They don't need a monopoly in either of these to justify their valuation. Simply get 10% of mobility and 10% of electricity storage and they'll have justified well above their current valuation.

Remember mobility services will subsume much of public transit and shipping too. The borders between industries are moving around. You can't just ask "how much of industry X will Tesla get?" because whole industries will ascent and others will wither as we transition to sustainable energy.

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> The automobile industry will contract as we move from individual ownership to mobility.

What does this even mean? People like to leave stuff in their cars (e.g. mug, gym bag). They like them to be at their preferred level of cleanliness or disorder. Some even use them as a means of personal expression.

If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market.

Exactly. I like knowing that there are extra diapers and a change of clothing for each kid in my car should I need them. I carry enough in to cover my current needs, but as anyone with kids known sometimes that isn't enough.

I know many people who keep golf clubs in their car because sometimes a salesman is looking to round out a 4-some. I like going to walmart/lowes... over lunch and leaving my treasures in my car.

Car sharing won't actually work out anyway because everyone needs their car during rush hour. Everyone is driving then anyway, and then the cars sit idle.

The car sharing won't cover everyone's needs and some people will stick to keeping their own car. I'd imagine people living in urban areas are more likely to use a car sharing service since it's uneconomical to own a car in most cities. I'd imagine the suburbs will be a mix of sharing and ownership. I can imagine a family having a car they keep for weekends or whenever the parents and kids need to go somewhere but they still use a car sharing service during the weekdays when mom takes the family car to work and dad need to get to work too.

I think you're exactly right. Once cars can drive themselves to destinations, it becomes so much easier to get by with one dedicated family car, supplemented with car sharing services.

For example: Mom takes service to work, possibly carpooling. Dad takes uses family car to drop off kids and goes to work. Car drives itself to mom's work for her to use to pick up kids and commute home. Dad takes service home. Or whatever. The point is kids can always be in the car with the extra diapers, with safety features parents want, etc.

The other part of this that people ignore is that a car sharing service could open up a lot of flexibility. For example, maybe our dedicated family car is just a sedan, but on this particular weekend with the grandparents in town, we can use the car sharing service to get a minivan and have everyone ride together. Or I want to pick up a piece of furniture and request a truck from the service. Or it's my anniversary, and I can request a luxury sedan to drive us to the restaurant for a touch of opulence. I'm sure there are many other examples people can think of.

Like you say, car sharing won't cover everyone's need, especially at first, but eventually, the big players in the space will have enough sophistication to cover many cases, especially for a second car.

I think car sharing even works in those cases. It's all a logistical problem. Not that there won't be some people who own cars. There just aren't that many problems that are hard to solve with car shares to outweigh the huge benefits.

car sharing works less well for getting to work because everyone else is trying to get to work then. You may as well own your own car for getting to work because you pay for all the costs anyway. All car sharing buys you is fixed maintenance costs on your car.

Car sharing starts to make sense when you want the car outside of rush hour. Want to go to the store for an hour at 2:30, no problem there are plenty of cars free. Want to get to work every day - you are paying peak rates for a car that will probably be used exactly twice that day, once to get you to work and once to get you home.

Car sharing (if self-driven) does provide an additional perk--time and money saved trying to find a place to park and paying for that parking. In addition, people turning into parking lots/garages (or worse parallel parking) interrupt the flow of traffic, making congestion worse. There's also many other potential improvements that self-driving cars could use to reduce congestion (faster speeds, reaction times, communication between cars, etc) and greatly lessen the commute during peak times

"Rush hour" is actually a pretty long distribution of time compared to the average length of a person's commute. I imagine just considering commuting, you could likely get close to half the amount of cars required with car-sharing, since you may get in at 7:30 and I may get in at 9:00. And you could provide good price incentives to convince people to mix up their commute times a bit. I already know people who push their times significantly to avoid traffic just due to the stress aspect.

This seems as good a place as any to add the familiar lament: Why does no one build new commuter rail in this country?

(This assumes that you're also from the US, for rhetorical convenience.)

I think it comes down to cost. Its only effective in very dense areas. For example, right now I'm on an established commuter rail line going from downtown to a suburb. I'm paying $12 round trip to travel 60 miles total. It's just barely cheaper than driving (not including parking expenses).

At this point in time, I think it's wise to avoid laying costly new tracks with the dawn of driverless cars on the horizon.

I think there are physical reasons why driverless cars will never be as good as trains: they're rubber-on-asphalt instead of steel-on-steel, and you need a lot more engines, space, and transportation of dead weight per unit of people moved -- and they'll probably still need parking, too. As near as I can tell, driverless cars are horseless-carriage thinking... but trains have no element of novelty to them.

Driverless cars can take you between train stations and destinations. No magical form of train will come to your house or go to your office.

In fact, this is a perfect use case for driverless cars. The problem with trains everywhere is the wasted time not on the train and the million stops along the way.

Ultimately I think driverless technology can revolutionarise high density public transport too:

It gives us exactingly detailed information on what journeys people need. The dataset will be immensely valuable in allowing the companies that sit on them to first start doing quasi-bus services:

Order a bunch of minibuses. During peak hours, offer an option: Wait for the next dedicated car to be free, or ride share with quicker availability and a discount. Limit detours strictly - there'll be plenty of "Follow road X and pick up 6 people on the way to station Y" type stretches that will make people happy (little time lost; feels efficient if there's not lots of turning off).

Then you can see them partnering with bus providers to dynamically fill in during peak hours, or even bidding for bus franchises and proposing contract changes that would allow for more dynamic, demand-based scheduling.

Ultimately this can feed into planning train type services - companies offering these type of drive share will be able to e.g. let people order "end to end" journeys of the type "pick me up at address 1, get me to address 2" where they show journey options that include rail when it makes sense. The key beying that if they do so, they will know the entire desired journey, and would be able to offer insight into the most efficient interchange locations or other changes to train services would be most desirable.

I really want to be in the business of writing the software that plans these things. The possibilities are crazy. Predicting where to have cars based on overall traffic flows, having cars ready for individuals who always leave at the same time. Think, a car is 30 seconds away every time you follow your routine. That's faster than getting into and starting your own car! Especially if you have a parking garage.

If you're predictable enough, it might be worth it to simply arrive a minute or two ahead of schedule.

The raving reviews you'd get the first times people order a car and are told instantly "your car is already waiting right outside your door" would be rather interesting.

Get in, and your favorite radio station or music is playing.

And for colder climates: Your car is already pre-heated. I remember too many winter mornings during winter in Norway when even ensuring our car would actually start in the morning was an annoyance (even with a garage, space heaters in the garage or motor heaters is sometimes necessary).

> No magical form of train will come to your house or go to your office.

Yes they will; the magic trains you're thinking of are called streetcars. And, with the oddities in oil and the difficulties of maintaining suburbia, we'll be moving back to dense streetcar suburbs soon enough.

Even buses don't take you door to door. I can't imagine a future where a streetcar is anywhere near as good as self driving cars (possibly paired with mass transit).

Are you familiar with streetcar suburbs? They'd have a streetcar running along a commercial street, with residential streets branching off from it; typically one would have a walk of a few blocks from streetcar stop to house. I don't know if a return to that pattern is the future I expect, but it's certainly the one I'm hoping for.

That is only true if the costs of the return trip is free: it isn't. When the car for the guy who arrives downtown at 7am goes back to the suburbs to get the guy who wants to arrive at 8am it is burning nearly as much fuel as it did getting in, and putting just as much wear on the car. The effect is shared cars are more expensive than just a car per person. (Note, this does not account for cost of parking which is a significant factor)

Wow, so for the short time you have kids in diapers this won't work for you personally. Big whoop.

We still have typewriters around too, and some people ride horses. Old tech doesn't die, it just diminishes to a smaller niche.

"Diapers" is just a synecdoche for parenting equipment: diapers, wipes, books, snacks for older kids, extra changes of clothing, etc.

Car seats will be a bigger problem: they are unwieldy, legally mandated, and require careful installation to be effective. Unlike diapers, even the small boosters used for older children can't fit in a shoulder bag.

A young couple expecting to have children in the next few years might balk at these inconveniences, and that could depress adoption of the 'mobility' model. You have to keep prospective purchasers in mind, who are evaluating their needs over the use-life of a car.

I find it shocking that something as simple as personal belongings would be a "lock in" to existing technology.

It's like saying "I prefer my horse, I can feed it grass off the side of the road, but you have to find some fancy petro-chemical station for your auto-mobile? Insane! My gas grows next to the road!"

I get it, but try to put yourself in the place of someone younger who doesn't make decisions like "I would never replace my car because I keep spare diapers there!"

>If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market.

This is very Bill Gates "no one would ever need more than ..." argument. Come on!!

ZipCar has literally nothing on the future of mobility.

You (and many people your age, conditioned from birth to place massive value on personal car ownership) may never move past that paradigm. You might go to your grave in 50 years a proud owner of a vehicle in an era where almost no one owns.

I think, instead of sagely predicting failure, maybe try creativity, use that entrepreneurial mindset to solve future challenges.

You want to keep spare diapers nearby? Why not have a secure storage module in the vehicle, lets say the trunk can be split into 2 or 4 secure storage modules.

You order an autonomous electric vehicle to your location, ETA 5 minutes. You hit the "bring my secure storage container to my location" option, restricting the available pool of cars to meet your need to those close to your container, at a small additional fee.

Boom, the "insolvable" problem of personal storage in a vehicle is solved by commoditizing the storage and use the AI vehicle to transport it where you need.

I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried.

It's not "personal belongings," it's "personal space." Hot-sheeting happens where sleeping space is extremely limited, like oil drilling camps, but it hasn't taken off among the general population, despite the fact that you only use your bed for around 1/3 of the day. People are willing to pay for their own beds and, frequently, their own apartments or houses, despite the fact that most of that space goes unused most of the time for someone with normal work and sleep schedules. Do you AirBnB your bed (at hourly rates)? Do you AirPantsAndT your clothes? Most people don't.

I doubt I'll last another 50 years, but I'll probably live long enough to see the end of the current robot taxi fad.

Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity.

Cars have not been. The earliest proto-human sought shelter from a storm. They did not seek personalized shelter during transportation.

I don't like the argument at all, and I think it's a cop out, a slippery slope argument.

>Do you AirBnB your bed (at hourly rates)? Do you AirPantsAndT your clothes? Most people don't.

This is just a very feeble slippery slope that ignores the very real differences.

Yes, clothing and shelter have been humans needs for far longer than civilization itself.

Can you say the same for micro-space in a personal transport?

Were humans owning personal space inside of pack animals 10,000 years ago?

It's a bad argument. There's no slippery slope here. Homes and clothes are fundamentally different than cars.

You cannot live a civilized life without a home and clothes. You can live a civilized modern life without a car. Obviously we approach higher order needs differently than lower order.

> Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity.

> Cars have not been. The earliest proto-human sought shelter from a storm. They did not seek personalized shelter during transportation.

Are you familiar with New World Economics' discussion of "really narrow streets"? One thing the author points out (in "Let's Take a Trip to an American Village") is that even in the 19th century, the US was very interested in what he calls "My Personal Means of Transportation" -- the fashionable thing to do was to have a carriage house, no matter how little you actually needed a carriage. I think you see less of this pattern elsewhere in the world (or else you just see less wealth; consider how "pedestrian" seldom has positive connotations and "equestrian" never has negative ones), but there's definitely an enthusiasm for personal transport in the US.

> Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity.

The need for transportation is just as ancient as the need for shelter. Before cars, it was a horse, or camel, or a chariot, or something else on wheels.

I think you underestimate the strength of car culture, and the value people place in personal space (at least in the US).

And as with so many things, why can't these unnecessarily-competing worlds coexist?

There are millions of overly confident entrepreneurs rationalizing millions of wacky, over-engineered money-grabs and only a few of those ideas have strength to be so culturally and socially transformative as the world you describe. Is the end of car ownership one of those lofty ideas? I am not so sure.

Edit: and on a more personal level, I see ideas like that -- the end of ownership, whether it be cars, software, or land -- as an attack on individual ownership, so that moneyed interests can instead own everything and lease it to the peasants at their leisure (and profit). The world needs the opposite: to make ownership easier and less costly, and to restore the the increasingly-stratospheric costs of everything* down to levels that put ownership within reach of the common man. Not owning cars is just another step towards feudalism.

* As for how, there could be much to gain simply by analyzing the cost structure of stuff and stripping out unnecessary middlemen, expenses, and materials. Adopting a more restrained form of capitalism, like what one sees in tight-knit economic communities or in idealized small-business environments, could perhaps foster a business culture centered around balancing customer, employee, and shareholder value. The current system of only maximizing shareholder value creates much of the turmoil, unnecessary innovation, and naked profiteering we see today.

Self driving cars are the future, hardly a fad.

Human extinction is definitely the future, eventually. Beyond that, I find it hard to make absolute statements about the future with no evidence or argument.

The problem with this is that there are multiple competing needs and desires here. People may have a desire for that personal space, but many will sacrifice those when it helps them meet other needs.

Yes, it's great to have personal space. But you know what? People sacrifice personal space for spending less money all the time. And for convenience.

Consider e.g. London - a city awash with money, where a lot of even people who could afford to be driven around by a personal chaffeur will opt for public transport for convenience.

As another example for London: People will opt to smell someones armpit on the train in the regular train carriages rather than pay a few pounds extra for a seat in the First Class carriages all the time. The value of personal space when travelling, as it turns out, is deemed by large parts of the public to be very low.

People tend to opt for personal space mainly when the public transit options are unusably bad compared to driving.

Places like London are perhaps the areas where this transition is most likely to start: Places where those who even own cars often own cars as a "contingency" for those times when the bus doesn't arrive or you're going somewhere odd that just doesn't work well with public transport currently.

In those cases, for a lot of people, it'd be very attractive to e.g. pay a membership fee to guarantee a certain level of "contention" for cars to be able to just press a button and have one arrive "fast enough". Even more so with the ability to do that on either end of a train ride. For a lot of people this will make a car pointless.

And in environments like this "personal space" is moot, as almost everyone are already used to using public transport some or most of the time.

At the same time, it is somewhere where local authorities are clamouring for ways to reduce parking and make car ownership less desirable. Expect housing units to start coming without parking spaces or with very few parking spaces in high density areas as cost saving measures, or because they'll sell some of those parking spaces to ride share companies, or make residents who want them buy them separately.

Expect planning rules to start reducing the maximum allowable number of parking spaces.

Places with plenty of space, sprawl and a strong culture of cars as independence will certainly experience this change last.

But consider e.g. the impact of a generation of youth who will eventually grow up with a situation where they may be able to rent a self-driving car on demand from before they are able to (afford to) buy one, and where e.g. parents may opt to just order a journey rather than driving them somewhere once old enough, and who will grow up increasingly likely to get used to some car taking them somewhere without needing to take the step to car ownership to get that freedom from parents driving them around. The "liberation" may become to be able to sign up for your own account so your parents can't see your every journey.

I think that the whole culture where car ownership is seen as a rite of passage and signifier of liberation from your parents could change far faster than you think.

Some people just like owning cars. I live in San Francisco and don't currently own a car, but I want one. Perfect example where Uber fails - I can't take my dog anywhere.

Different people have different values. Also I'm quite young, so I don't think age is a strict delineation.

"Some people just like owning cars."

Yes I did point out that most Americans and many people are conditioned from birth to value car ownership, even when it's a poor financial decision.

"Perfect example where Uber fails - I can't take my dog anywhere

As I told the other guy: Stop predicting failure based on problems, put on your creator and builder hat, and solve the problem.

Why not have pet friendly vehicles available at a small charge, guaranteed clean?

It bothers me that these problems are so easy to solve and yet people are so willing to write off a future possible technology without so much as thinking through any of the solutions.

You seem very defensive. I was just pointing out that I don't own a car and live in the epicenter of the ride-sharing revolution, and I'd much rather go back to owning a car.

Regarding the dog, I'm just pointing out something that currently doesn't work for me. Until they fix it I don't care - right now their solution does not help me and nobody has done anything to address it.

My point is simple. Right now owning a car is better than not owning a car for me. Until that changes I will want to own a car. If you don't want to own a car then good for you - different people have different desires.

If it's so easy to solve why don't you share the solution?

I did.

I literally did share a solution in this post, and the one before.

- Commoditize storage and transport it to you on demand

- Offer pet friendly cars

Boom. Solved.

As I also wrote: "I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried."

Is this hackernews, where builders come to talk about exciting ways they're solving tomorrow's problems?

Am I on the wrong site?

Do you have any evidence that either of those will make money? I have evidence that pet friendly cars lose money - Uber used to have a program that catered towards dogs and they cancelled it because it lost money.

You haven't solved anything until you've demonstrated a working solution. If it were so easy to fix problems in the real world, politicians would have our economy constantly booming, there would be more jobs than people, and the Middle East would be the most peaceful place on Earth.

Anyway, I don't think we're going to agree on anything. I'm exiting this thread.

Give it a rest. There is no possible way he can solve it right now, we don't have self driving cars yet.

> Uber used to have a program that catered towards dogs and they cancelled it because it lost money.

By the same standard uber as a whole is not a working solution.

In fact it may not be.

I thought I was here to discuss programming and related news rather than engaging in mindless boosterism.

>"You seem very defensive. I was just pointing out that I don't own a car and live in the epicenter of the ride-sharing revolution, and I'd much rather go back to owning a car."

And I was just pointing out that your personal experiences with today's ride sharing aren't relevant to a hypothetical discussion of an unrelated future transport technology.

I'm defensive because you're continually derailing a thread about futuretech to list your personal experiences with todaytech. I don't get why you derail this conversation to make it emotional and personal, so I get defensive about the track of the conversation of solving tomorrow's problems. Stop taking it personally, think bigger! Solve a problem!

I think that most people are hardwired from start to value ownership of things.

You might have noticed that people are hoarding a lot of stuff, that are of little value to them. It's probably an intrinsic value to most people to own things. It might vary a little between cultures, but it seems to be a common trait.

If you don't - great for you.

However. It might happen that you one day walk by a car on display in a mall, and notices the nice paint, a practical laptop holder, the particularly nice storage boxes for diapers and what not, and thinks to yourself - "I want that car."

It's not "car ownership" that we value. It's autonomy and independence.

A teenager doesn't just "want a car." He wants that freedom that car gives him... to go somewhere without bugging his parents or friends for a ride. If you're in a big city or someplace where this is not the norm, I could see you believing otherwise.

(And I laughed at "guaranteed clean." Right. All that means is you get a refund when you find the dog turd in the back seat.)

"A teenager doesn't just "want a car." He wants that freedom that car gives him."

Precisely, and this is why owning the car isn't that important. This teenager presumably still has to pay for the car and fuel, or bug his parents for it. Paying for the (cheaper) self driving ride is no different.

So why not call a cab? or take a bus?

It is different. If you're relying on someone (or something) else, waiting around, you're not "independent."

Cabs are expensive, relatively slow, and busses are just slow and don't take you to your destination.

Really, this doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

Having personal transportation, rather a horse, a bike, or a car, is pretty vital for a lot, if not most of us, here in the US.

Self driving shuttle services will be a great new way to transport us, especially in metro areas, but this won't work very far from the center of those so if the valuation of that market is too optimistic in regards to Tesla the holders of their stock will pay for it.

If you look at the number of US car companies that have started from scratch in the past 70 years you don't see many still standing (pretty close to none). Tesla has a very different model though so we can't lump them in with most all of the others.

In my own humble opinion, I think Tesla's fate will be decided by how fast they can produce a low end, very affordable and dependable car for the masses. If they can deliver that within the next 3-4 years they've got a very good shot at moving up to competing with Ford and GM.

If they instead try to compete with higher end cars they'll find that's a hard road to travel. At some point soon the big players will produce a car that's a competitive option and dilute their market and they'll die.

It's worth remembering that both Honda and Toyota captured market here with affordable dependable cars, not luxury cars. Those came quite a few years later.

I fully expect Tesla will produce an affordable car though, and it would make perfect sense if they called it a "Model T".

I think you are generally right about a primary/family car, but less so for a second, commuter car. I think this mainly hinges around making the self-driving technology safe, reliable and cheap (that is, cheaper than owning a car currently). I think taxis would be used more if they were significantly cheaper. Buses and trains have extra delays for stops, and you may still have to walk/bike after you get off. Having a cheap transportation option once you get off the train would probably increase train ridership as well, and decrease congestion during peak hours (at least for the major freeways, it may increase it some on roads closer to the train station)

Trains should be faster than cars in dense urban environments (if you are close to the station), e.g. London Euston to Watford 19miles 15-20mins by train 32mins by car (outside rush hour).

Although you do have to enter the station ~5 mins before the train leaves (allowing time to get through the ticket barrier, walk to the platform, board the train), plus exiting at the other end. My train gets into London Bridge in the morning at :32 but I don't get to the street until :36 because of the sheer volume of people. It seems minor, but it does all add up. That said, in rush hour there's no contest - that same journey would take 1 hour+.

> The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market.

- A personal, individual vehicle which comes to pick you up where you are and take you to exactly where you want to go is a much MUCH higher value proposition than public transit.

- Add self-driving to the mix, and the cost of that service will plummet.

- When the car providing that service can drive itself, then there is little to no inconvenience to the vehicle owner to offer that service, and significant financial incentive.

- Because car owners will be able to make "rent" from their capital investment, owning a car will start to look more like property ownership than a depreciating investment-- especially as maintenance and operation costs fall for electric vehicles.

- There will be very strong financial incentive to use self-driving ride pools instead of putting up a large wad of cash to own a car. So total car ownership will go way down, and will be done much more by the wealthy and much less by the working/middle class.

- Cost of ownership is especially high in cities (parking), and the market for ride sharing is highest. So probably many fewer city dwellers will own cars.

- Families that own can shrink to one car instead of two, since the car can drop people off or pick them up.

I think there are a lot of pretty good reasons why the vehicle market is going to change significantly in the next 15 years.

> Cost of ownership is especially high in cities (parking), and the market for ride sharing is highest. So probably many fewer city dwellers will own cars.

If it's really self-driving it can go park wherever. Not very good for the environment, perhaps, but it completely solves that problem.

The farther the car goes to park, the longer the wait for it to pick you up on demand. Not to mention, traveling a few blocks rarely saves much on parking in densely populated areas.

It can travel way further than "a few blocks" and I'd guess most trips are not so unexpected that it's impossible to accept a delay of 30 minutes or maybe even longer.

If your parking spot isn't included as part of the building where you live, then you're going to have to either buy some more property (however small or far away) to keep your car, or pay someone to let you park your car on theirs.

Yes, agreed, but if you live in a major city that's already the case (or you drive around for an hour looking for a space, something the self-driving car could also do).

Right. And so my point is the expense and inconvenience of parking in cities is incentive for you to either (a) not buy a car, and instead use an on-demand (self-driving) rideshare service, or (b) buy a car, and recoup costs at little inconvenience by putting it into a self-driving rideshare pool.

The end result is fewer cars owned by fewer people, but utilized much more fully, so the cars that do exist in cities spend more of their time driving and in-service, rather than sitting parked and empty for 98% of their lifetimes.

But a self-driving car that can either find street parking or else drive to some suburban lot makes that incentive much weaker, not stronger?

A service will be able to keep cars near you, and will have sufficiently higher utilisation of their cars to be willing to pay more for parking spots. Your waiting time to get a taxi service will likely drop substantially at the same time as your waiting time to get picked up by a car you own is likely to go up.

As someone who doesn't own a car, the only potential appeal to me of owning a car is shorter waits and predictability (always there). If the predictabiity and waits drop for rental services, my reasons for considering buying a car would rapidly drop. If the waits to use a car I own go up, my reasons for considering buying one would drop further.

As someone who doesn't own a car I don't think you have that much insight into the mindset of people who own a car.

You're assuming I've lived in a car free household all my life.

The funny thing, some of this already exists these days. It is called ZipCar, Car2Go, or DriveNow. All of them suffer from the very same problem: service.

It does not matter if a car is selfdriving or not. To be recognized as available by someone means a utilization of about 30% by the providing company. But a utilization of about 30% does not drive down costs. You still of costs for producing and servicing the vehicle, which is way higher than just the energy costs.

Tesla has no experience in free floating vehilce fleets. Uber has no experience in such thing. ZipCar has. Car2Go has. Car2Go as an subsidary of Daimler even has experience in car production.

Now think of that.

ZipCar does not pick you up and drop you off at location. I can tell you as a Zip Car user, there are many issues that caused me to discontinue, none of which was service.

1 - the zip cars available to me are a few blocks away to walk which isn't convenient if I'm carrying something or lazy.

2 - high cost. Taking uber right now is so much cheaper. Imagine if cars were self-driving. Costs would plummet

3 - parking. This can be very hard depending on where I'm going

4 - I have to pay for the length of time I'm out, not for my ride. I also need to return the car when I'm done.

These are the biggest pain points in my opinion. Also, not needing to drive myself is a huge bonus. The leverage of solving these pain points are huge, imo.

As a zip car member, I wish it did all those things, but it is a far cry from the self-driving future GP is talking about. I'm also worried about tesla's market share, but more because I don't know if they can corner all the markets they are about to compete in: automotive manufacturing, batteries and set driving systems are all hard enough problems for an entire company. It's a lot to get right.

The ridesharing systems (like uber pool and lyft line) are meant to alleviate that utilization problem. Zipcar has no experience with the complex logistics automation work for ridesharing that Uber and Lyft are doing, nor do they have a large enough userbase to make that ridesharing system viable and competitive.

zipcar and it's ilk have the same problems as bike-share programs: people don't use the service in such a way that the vehicles get to where the demand will be. And if you finish work at the end of the day and all the cars are gone, you aren't going to trust it again.

the bike shares solve this by driving trucks around, collecting bikes from areas where they aren't going to be needed and moving them to areas where demand is about to spike. it's hard to load up a truck full of cars to meet demand in the business district at 5pm, but it's very easy to send over all the spare capacity in your autonomous vehicle fleet.

That is it, and the ability to use the data to start offering sharing options with either discounts or priority pick up to make people ride share when capacity is full will be a massive change ("we're seeing high demand; you can wait 10 minutes for a vehicle to yourself, or a ride share can pick you up in 5 minutes"). There are plenty of times where I know it will take time to get a car because of demand, and would happily share if it meant I'd get picked up sooner.

Smoothing that out, so that you come to expect a car to be available very rapidly no matter what, with only minor inconveniences, may not end private car ownership but certainly will make a lot more people opt for alternatives - I know for myself (I don't own a car) the occasional lack of predictability in how soon I'll get picked up is the one aggravation that occasionally make me want one.

ZipCar is very useful in it's own regard. It's problem is that you need to pick it up and drop it off at the same location, and availability during peak hours.

Self driving car networks basically can solve that.

You missed the point like the GP. None of those services are anything like what's coming. Car2go still has to be parked, has to be close, you have to live in the home zone. Zip car is just... Not even close. It's a rental service and you need to take the car back.

Comparing either of those or public transit to self driving cars misses the point entirely.

This is a common pattern to electric and self-driving enthusiasts, but unfortunately it's the automotive equivalent of Wired articles about the internet circa 1996.

Problems include:

- Cost. All of the (limited) Tesla automation technologies cost more than my last car.

- Liability. Who is liable for mishaps? As Uber has demonstrated accidents and traffic violations happen with automated tech.

- Utility. The majority of users aren't high income people in SFO and NYC. We have parking, getting picked up is cool, but not high ROI.

- Pool vs own. As we've seen with transportation services as varied as stagecoaches, cabs, railways, and airlines, service based transportation models aren't cheap. Service price is always demand driven, it will cost more when you need it.

- Owning a car in the US is one of the greatest values available in any market. I can be at any point in the CONUS in <3 days for under $500 with most cars.

I think self driving cars may put the bullet in some cabs for good after Uber and Lyft implode, and may bring train-like scale to intercity transit. But the fantasy being sold today is just that.

Thank you, I've wanted to make a point similar to the one you've made but already tied it all together.

> Cost: We're not there yet, but not paying registration/insurance/repayments/garage space will make this economical in time - at first at least for second car owners > Liability: Insurance - I think automation will be safer i.e. less accidents > Utility: I think door to door driving without looking for parking is a pretty good perk > Pool vs. own: Both of these models will be competitive with each other, so in the end it won't matter

plus there will be additional benefits Safety: Less drunk drivers on the road, less accidents from fatigue, etc. Cost: at a minimum, it will bring cab prices down Efficiency: Less traffic jams as autonomous systems won't slam on the brakes when they see a police car, etc. Smoother flowing traffic, higher legal road speeds if reaction time is shorter

And then there are other non-car transport which will benefit: logicistics, mail, deliveries etc. Minibuses that could pick you up door to door through automated route planning etc.

Interesting comments but they're hard to read because you use the word 'less' rather than 'fewer': http://blog.dictionary.com/fewer-vs-less/ ! This seems to be a generational shift so please inform your peers! :)

I don't think the change will be quick, but I think you're overestimating the problems and underestimating the potential benefits here.

Cost is a short term problem. Costs will go down. Liabilities can be insured against.

Here is where I see it going:

Stage 1: Taxis start being replaced by self-driving vehicles at much lower cost. Car rentals too - liabilities potentially go down once they reach a certain level of safety as you don't face the risk of a poorer than average driver. Usage skyrockets as costs drop, and as services can cut pick-up times drastically by more optimally having a larger fleet parked around town and/or driving around town.

Stage 2: We start seeing pooling options from more and more rental providers to deal with high demand situations. E.g. Rental company crunches their numbers and see that my road => the local train station always maxes out capacity during rush hour and decides that rather than buying more vehicles, surge pricing coupled with offering a discount that brings the price back towards normal for each rider as long as it at most takes X minutes extra will be popular and more profitable.

Stage 3: They put in minibuses on some of the most congested streches and/or team up with the local bus companies to launch apps where you can tell them you're at the stop and get guaranteed pickup within Y minutes by either the regularly scheduled bus or a car. You pay a slight premium for the guarantee, which covers the car when the bus won't be there and a profit share with the bus company. (For me the only reason not to consistently use the bus is that if I need to be somewhere urgently, I can't always risk waiting for a bus that might be full; if I had a guarantee that if I press the button and walk to the bus stop, I will get picked up in 5 minutes, it'd make me use the bus more)

Stage 4: As self-drive increase in general, cities put the thumb on parking spots. E.g. in parts of London you already won't get planning consent for housing with more than 1.5 parking spaces per living unit as a means to cap car ownership. Expect to see that gradually driven down, with the expectation that people will buy parking space for their self-driven car elsewhere and/or forgo having one. Driving down the limits on parking will allow for denser developments, making ride share options etc. even more viable.

Stage 5: Youth grow up without depending on their parents to drive them anywhere from the moment they are trusted to go by themselves.

Basically, I see it as a process where the convenience of apps to get you somewhere will keep increasing to the point where people will find themselves increasingly opting to check these apps first and find themselves needing a car less and less. Some transport apps are already combining route-finding with then offering to order an Uber for you.

Expect to see more of that making it less attractive to get a car over time.

Especially as youth get used to a greater flexibility and level of freedom using these type of apps before they can buy a car. Car ownership many places represents freedom from parents driving you around, but more and more teenagers can expect to be in situations were parents opt to order them a car instead of driving themselves.

Before long, a whole generation will experience car ownership as irrelevant to the ability of liberating their transport options from parental control.

Sure, some people will still opt to own one, but many already forgo car ownership, and that number will certainly rise rapidly.

Good point. Cars will still be valuable for road trips, but lots and lots of people will choose to skip car ownership and just settle for local, self-driving travel.

Maybe there will be a stratified market for rental self-driving cars; one for "just this trip" and another for "five days of exclusive use for a road trip."

> I think there are a lot of pretty good reasons why the vehicle market is going to change significantly in the next 15 years

But not necessarily shrinking the market. The cost of mobility goes down, consumption will go up. How high? I'm going to guess absurdly high. The reason US cities are sprawling messes is that they were built as the cost of mobility dropped off a cliff (cars and trucks replaced horses). Go read Clifford Simak's "City". People will live in self driving cars and commute in their sleep. It's going to be nuts.

Exactly.

Maybe poor people will take the robocab from hell, with sick on the floor. Most people will not.

Uh, what? Cabs are already really popular. Why would a self driving car be "from hell"? You think they can't be cleaned?

Poor people might take "the robocab from hell", but just as I don't order "the humancab from hell" now, but order from the slightly more upscale "clean, air-conditioned high end sedan with blacked out windows and wifi" for just a slightly higher fee, people who earn more will still have alternatives, yet will still benefit from the cost reductions.

The difference being that poor people will have the "robocab from hell" alternative rather than have nothing they can afford, and that more people will afford said high end sedan when it's self-driving, and will be able to justify it more often, and more people will afford to trade up to even more luxurious services.

There is already a marked class difference in commuting in London: Low paid people take the bus four two hours+ for commutes that'd take less than half that if they could afford the train from the outer fare zones (bus-rides cost the same within the entire London fares area), so transport is already today segregated by income. A lot of the longer bus lines makes no apparent sense until you realise that low paid people often can't afford the train, or a car.

This 'switch from ownership to mobility'-buzz is one of the most overvalued ideas recently. Much like the Kindle was supposed to kill the book.

Why must some people see new inventions always as colossal destroyers of products they don't like instead of the more humble 'enriching ones freedom to choose'?

They're true believers and their faith is called religion.

Wait. But Kindle killed the book. I stopped buying paper books long time ago.

I've never bought a Kindle, and the only e-books I own are ones that came free with the purchase of a printed copy.

The kindle may not have killed the book, but it has made a massive dent in the paper-book market, despite substantial problems with e-books. It will likely continue to eat away at it.

If self-driving cars has as massive an impact on car ownership as e-books have had on the paper book market, that will be a dramatically noticeable change in most cities.

>Simply get 10% of mobility and 10% of electricity storage and they'll have justified well above their current valuation.

Please show your math.

>Tesla will basically take the market from coal and petroleum.

And you base this off, what, exactly?

Sometimes I think that half of HackerNews didn't even know solar or battery backups were a thing before Tesla. These are competitive spaces where Tesla has essentially no market share (just like cars).

I think Tesla will be successful, but I doubt they end up market leader in any of these things.

Battery backups were several times higher before Tesla. Just looking at the South Australia proposed battery, Tesla's offer of $250/kWh is about a third of other bids for storage, from what I can tell.

> Sometimes I think that half of HackerNews didn't even know solar or battery backups were a thing before Tesla. These are competitive spaces where Tesla has essentially no market share (just like cars).

I'm genuinely curious if the numbers reported by SolarCity represent the full picture. [1] shows SolarCity with ~35% national marketshare while the closest competitor is at just over 10% (Vivint). This was in 2015, but it still appears to have a significant lead.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/research/subscription/u.s.-pv...

> 's valuation is also based on the idea that clean energy will replace fossil fuels.

Last month Tesla sold 10,000 electric vehicles to Fords 2,500.

If we are serious about climate change, then sometime in the 2030s [1] we have to stop building new combustion engines.

The entire technology platform on which these 6,7 million Ford sales rest is about to be swapped out in little over a decade.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/germanys-bundesrat-vote...

It's a good point: there very well could be a few Kodak Moments if technology changes and the incumbents don't adapt.

But predicting the future is hard.

> If we are serious about climate change, then sometime in the 2030s [1] we have to stop building new combustion engines.

Or there might be a breakthrough in carbon capture, converting atmospheric CO2 into petroleum and we can drive combustion engines forever.

CO2 capture is an area of active research and it's entirely possible that advances there will make Tesla and Solar City moot.

Effective CO2 capture might cause governments to not mandate a certain number of electric vehicles or provide tax credits for buyers or impose a carbon tax, but if electric vehicles are better and (eventually) cheaper to manufacture than gas vehicles, then people might still prefer electric to gas even without environmental motivation.

> CO2 capture is an area of active research and it's entirely possible that advances there will make Tesla and Solar City moot.

I don't know how likely that is. Even if carbon capture comes through, the low hanging fruit of fossil fuels are gone so now we have to get more invasive in harvesting the hard-to-get ones (strip mining, fracking, etc). It's likely that even with C02 emissions taken care of that we'll want electric vehicles and renewable power in general.

I mean capture of CO2 from the air and conversion into a fuel that can be used. Something along the lines of algal farms that soak up sunlight and CO2 from the air and excrete alcohol. Combining solar and the CO2 that has already been released into a liquid fuel suitable for a variety of uses. We could cease raw material extraction entirely.

Seems inefficient. Fossil Fuels work today because you just suck them out of the ground and ta-da! free energy when you burn it. If you have to pump enormous energy into harvesting the carbon so you can burn it and re-harvest it, why not just put that energy straight into the car and cut out the carbon entirely?

The battery is the thing that makes an electric car "expensive" today, but it's following a consistent downward price curve. In ~5-7 years, it will cost more to make an ICE car than an EV car, and then ICE dies. Simple as that.

Not if the EV can't go more than 200 miles and takes half a day to refuel.

Except they already go >300 miles and take <75 mins to charge to 90%...

> If you have to pump enormous energy into harvesting the carbon so you can burn it and re-harvest it, why not just put that energy straight into the car and cut out the carbon entirely?

Energy density. Jet fuel has about 25x the energy per kg as the best lithium batteries. Perhaps batteries will be able to match carbon fuels some day, but it's a long way off.

Ah I see, I thought you were just talking about carbon sequestration

Or maybe there will be a breakthrough in battery tech and in five years we all drive Teslas.

CCS + Power2Gas + synthetic fuel is unlikely to be cost competitive. It's not like climate scientists don't consider that option. In fact the only half way plausible scenarios for reaching the two degree target involve going carbon negative after 2050. And synthetic fossil fuels are probably the only way to make airtravel carbon neutral.

Full de-carbonisation requires a multi-pronged approach, and cars are at a point where electric vehicles are already very close to conventional vehicles. Within a factor of two or three for range, so totally sufficient for most needs, and not much more expensive. It's one of the better options we have to de-carbonize a huge sector. Second only to the energy production sector itself.

Compare to food production which looks absolutely hopeless (the two degree pathways often assume we manage to implement massive dietary changes see e.g. here http://tool.globalcalculator.org )

... because Tesla is the only company making electric cars, right?

Even if CO2 to petroleum were 100% efficient, you're still throwing away 70+% of the energy by burning it in an ICE rather than putting it in a battery as electricity.

Any likely method of CO2 to petroleum is likely to be below 50%, more like 15-30% efficient. Round-trip efficiency an entire order of magnitude worse than battery. That's why batteries are better for ground-based applications and will remain so.

I'm honestly not sure the assumptions underlying your comment. Solar cell to battery is pretty inefficient at the moment with the best solar cells converting 26% of the solar energy hitting the cell into electricity and the charge-discharge efficiency of li ion cells is 80-90%. The ultimate amount of energy delivered is less than 30%.

Regardless, if any of the biological/algal methods of CO2 to fuel techniques become successful, why would we care if 5%, 50%, 100% of the solar energy received makes its way to the end product. It's basically free energy at that point. The only thing that would matter is real estate to house the facilities.

Round-trip electricity efficiency is what I was referring to, assuming you'd use electricity. If you have to synthesize fuel using electricity and then burn it to produce either movement (shaft-power) or electricity, the efficiency is on the order of 10%. Whereas for batteries, the efficiency is on the order of 80-90%.

Isn't vegetation essentially a form of carbon capture, and it's not nearly effective enough to keep up with human CO2 emissions?

To put things in perspective, Ford sold over 645,000 vehicles so far this year. Tesla feels massively overvalued.

[1] https://corporate.ford.com/content/dam/corporate/en/investor...

I think in a few years we will talk about how in 2017 people based their investment on the idea, that one company will win in not one, but in two already saturated markets, competing against companies with hundreds of thousands of employees.

I'm far from convinced that the people buying 40,000 Ford F150s every 3 weeks are doing it for mobility and they're just dying to take a "taxi" everywhere instead.

Those aren't congesting city streets, at least that I've ever seen.

Will they though? Traditional car makers are not ignoring renewables by any means.

From article:

> Dozens of other companies around the world have battery-powered cars on the market, and more are in development. Investors “act as if Tesla has some sort of patented product that cannot be replicated,” said Dave Sullivan, an analyst at researcher AutoPacific Inc.

> “By the end of this decade, there’s going to be some significant choice for consumers looking for an electric vehicle,” he said, calling Tesla’s valuation outpacing Ford’s “mind boggling.”

I get that that is the vision, and 10% of mobility or electricity would justify their valuation. I'm just not buying that they are going to achieve either. In fact, I'm of the opinion that they won't even exist as an independent company in five years time.

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