Probably. It seems way more convenient and efficient to be able to summon a car to any location on demand than to have just one car that you use for everything.
No more parking, no more refueling, no more vehicle maintenance; just push a button and a car shows up within minutes (or in some cases, seconds) to pick you up, and step out of the vehicle when you reach your destination. Want a specific model or paint color? It's just a couple taps on your phone away. Car breaks down and needs a tow? Replacement gets summoned automatically, and the car company credits a couple bucks to your account for the inconvenience.
If that kind of service becomes available at a reasonable price point, I suspect it won't be long before car ownership becomes much less common.
Under the no-private ownership model, you are going to get screwed by surge pricing.
With a self-driving car fleet there are probably lots of other little tricks you can do too, like offer discounts for sharing a vehicle with another passenger, or use machine learning to predict what locations will have the highest demand during particular parts of the day and move portions of the fleet to cover those areas.
People on the West Side who want to get to the East Side, and people on the East Side who want to get to the West Side. (You'd figure that maybe optimizing this would bring more value to society then making a car drive itself...) 8am-9am, 4pm-6pm. You don't need ML to figure this out - just look at a Google Maps traffic heatmap in rush hour.
Carpools, vanpools, already exist. For some reason, though, the vast majority of the cars parked on the freeway are single-occupant vehicles. I can't imagine why people aren't keen on sharing their vehicle with a stranger, or pay triple surge pricing to get home when it starts raining.
This community is highly opposed to relying on web services that they don't control... Yet it is perfectly OK with ditching their car, and instead relying on a car-on-demand service to get to and from work?
I want to go out to shop. Right now, I get out in my car, drive for twenty minutes to the mall, and leave when I want to do so. My kid is with me, but on the way back he gets sick, so I have to cut short my drive and head back home. he throws up in the car. I clean it when I get home, and go back out to the store five minutes away by car to pick up some medicine for him as my wife watches him.
HN "solution."
I page a car. It takes maybe ten to fifteen minutes to drive to me from the last passenger, since it only is designed to head back to dispatch every so often. The car reeks of weed, because why not light up a bud? It's not like they can arrest you or anything. I punch in a complaint on the app.
We get to the mall. I shop, and summon a car. This time it takes a little less, maybe five to ten minutes, because the mall is closer to dispatch or a place where a lot of cars get dumped off. I program my next shopping route. My kid gets sick mid-ride though.
I have to hit the emergency button, and reroute back to my house. My kid gets sick in the car. When we get home, I have to hit another button to "rent" the car another period so I can clean it, but it still gets sent back due to the emergency button being hit, and I can hit with a nice big fee due to cleanliness issues. I now need to go back out to get medicine, but five minutes by car is 30-45 min by walking. So it's another 15 minutes to get a car.
Even if all goes well, I could be looking at an additional 45 minutes just getting stuff done, as well as cost and loss of passenger quality because I don't own the vehicle. Hell, it could show up at my door full of shit, semen, and vomit, because some homeless guy is using it as his own personal hangout to sleep in. Or it could take even longer because I need to rent a driverless suv so I can bring furniture home to me, and those are relatively rare and command a premium to rent.
No one here is thinking of day to day use by all kinds of people, or what benefits ownership provides. I own my car, that means I dont have to worry about it showing up in a horrid state, I don't have to worry about paying large amounts for minor cosmetic damage, I don't have to budget extra time summoning the vehicle on site (which escalates the farther out from a city hub you are...you're doubling your travel time, and this would heavily penalize rural people), and there are a host of issues eliminated as well. Just the fact that I don't need to put a destination in is one thing. I can change my mind en route, I can wander, and if my wife calls me and tells me to come home, I can do so near instantly.
What makes you say that? The median wait time for an Uber in many cities these days is [around 3 minutes][1]. Were self-driving cars to become widespread, I imagine that time would be significantly reduced due to a drastically higher density of available cars. (Instead of just a few Ubers, imagine if nearly every car on the road could potentially come pick you up.)
> The car reeks of weed, because why not light up a bud? It's not like they can arrest you or anything. I punch in a complaint on the app.
Plausible. Passengers who do that though would most likely get fined the same way you would if you tried that in a rental car, so I don't imagine it'll be widespread. And if you prefer you can always summon another car. Should be there in another 60 seconds or so, if not less. The weed-scented car will head back to dispatch for cleaning so none of its future passengers have to deal with the smell.
> We get to the mall. I shop, and summon a car. This time it takes a little less, maybe five to ten minutes, because the mall is closer to dispatch or a place where a lot of cars get dumped off.
Probably more like seconds because there would be 5 or so cars already waiting in the parking lot for shoppers who might want to leave soon. In fact, it might even be faster than having your own car in this case since the self-driving car can pull right up to the mall exit to pick you up.
> I have to hit the emergency button, and reroute back to my house.
No emergency button necessary, the app lets you change your destination in-flight. Actually, you might even just be able to call out "okay Google, take me home" and the car will hear you and reroute.
> When we get home, I have to hit another button to "rent" the car another period so I can clean it
Well, no. You just report a mess in the car and it drives back to dispatch for cleaning. A bit expensive for you due to cleaning fees sure, but necessary to ensure the car is clean for other passengers, and as a bonus you don't have to clean up the vomit yourself. Hopefully this isn't a regular occurrence for you.
> I now need to go back out to get medicine, but five minutes by car is 30-45 min by walking. So it's another 15 minutes to get a car.
Again, probably 3 at most. More likely under a minute.
> Hell, it could show up at my door full of shit, semen, and vomit, because some homeless guy is using it as his own personal hangout to sleep in.
Again, probably a pretty rare occurrence, and if it does occur all that means is another minute or so of waiting for another car to show up.
> Or it could take even longer because I need to rent a driverless suv so I can bring furniture home to me, and those are relatively rare and command a premium to rent.
SUVs aren't nearly that rare on today's streets. In a driverless car future they might be somewhat more rare because people will only request them when they need the extra trunk space, but even then it's hard to imagine the wait time being more than 10 minutes in even a small city. If you're requesting one from the furniture store it might even show up in seconds (because lots of people coming from that location want SUVs, so a computer algorithm has arranged to have several nearby at all times). If not, you can always schedule a pick up a few minutes in advance to make sure the car is there waiting for you by the time you get out of the store.
[1]: http://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-heres-how-long-it-takes-ge...
I hope so.
Presumably. It's pooling for cost-saving reasons, much like cloud computing. If people want to be frugal, they won't buy a car.