Hacker News Reader

Comment by PinguTS | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com