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Comment by sporkenfang | Hacker News Reader

> Does no one live in suburbia or have kids? The idea of sharing a car just doesn't make sense. it's part home / workshop / storage area. Maybe innovation solves this. Your rental minivan will dump its pod of crap at your house when it drops you off and picks it up when you call it.

Ok, so this is in no way a criticism of you or your kids, but having kids doesn't have to mean that (e.g., would you let your kid leave her crayons on the subway? in the public library?). Sure, kids anywhere could occasionally mean kid vomit, but that's what damages fees are for, right?

Lots of people, my sister included, have kids and don't even own cars, today, right now.

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You didn't understand him. He didn't mean that your kids will mess up the car, he meant that when you have kids, your car fills up with kid paraphernalia that you don't want to constantly load and unload.

My car has in it:

1. My daughter's carseat.

2. About three kleenex-box-sized volume worth of her books and toys.

3. Wet wipes and diapers and changing equipment.

4. A booster seat.

5. A box of food and eating stuff (bibs, etc.)

Those all live in my car permanently. I don't want to take them all out and put them all back every time I go to the store.

Things will change, people raised kids for thousands of years before the automobile. To some extent, the reason you carry around all of that stuff is because you have the car, and the current state is the best of all possible alternatives for you and your family. In the future, the best of all possible alternatives might change, and the conditions that lead you to having made a choice to live a car centric lifestyle may change such that future parents of young children will do it differently.

Maybe the design of cars radically changes. Maybe the design of spaces in which we live changes to accommodate a more car free/car subscription but not ownership lifestyle. Parents are a large market and people will make money by solving these problems, but the first step before that is autonomy.

Between the alternatives of:

1. Pay a bit more for a car you own (I mean, this isn't THAT expensive. A good used car costs maybe $8,000 and can last for five years).

2. Fundamentally restructuring your life to a pre-modern approach of childcare

Which one would you do?

From what I see, you're looking at the current set of constraints/opportunities and then just inserting a self driving car, the reality is that autonomy and the way people live is going to change things in many hard to predict ways. You're heuristic is probably applicable for the first ~5 years, but after then all bets are off.

A few things that I think you are assuming that will not change are:

1) High availability of free/cheap parking at all of your destinations including your home.

2) high availability of autonomous cars actually for sale to end users. Due to the odd liability of an autonomous car (is the owner responsible for a crash? how do you insure against that) I anticipate most/all L5 autonomy to be subscription based, not available for purchase.

3) Prohibitively expensive congestion/registration/etc charges for owner occupied cars in order to reduce the number of cars on the road

4) car ownership remaining legal (unlikely to change, I admit)

There is a lot that can happen. You will probably own a car for the rest of your life, your children probably will never own a car.

Its the younger generations that will adopt car sharing. People that are buying fewer cars and use Uber etc anyway. Once they have children they will adjust to a car free lifestyle as they are used to it. Where as people that have kids currently won't have any kids as kids do grow up so might forgo owning cars as well in the future. Another thing is that car shapes and sizes will change dramatically as you don't need a sedan for 1 person commuting to work every day because of that the size of the car the size of battery and motor required will come down with the price.

There's more to it than that. The self driving car promises advantages beyond a smaller total cost of transportation.

From an individual perspective though, few people will need to make a big tradeoff decision all at once. It'll start by just trying out the service, using it when convenient. A few years later, when the question of fixing or replacing a car comes up, then people will ask themselves whether they really need a car.

Get a bag.

My family have two cars. We have two kids. Somehow we manage to do all stuff you are moaning about using a bag. I think your argument boils down to how much effort are you willing to do to save some cash. For you storing a few books in the car is worth $500 a year to you. For most of us we'd take that $500 and buy a bag.

I'm sure if we're all sharing cars you'll be able to order one with a child seat. And why wouldn't they have complimentary wet wipes and all the other stuff? Books, iPad, whatever.

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