Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

As I've said I don't know how many times before in these threads: This doesn't take into account, not even rural areas, but areas that are simply not metropolitan cities. The idea of vehicles-on-demand out here where I live, where I still commute between farmers fields, is utterly laughable. Who on Earth is going to buy them and operate them? And where is everyone going to warrant the service?

More to the point, when you're doing things with your vehicles that don't involve just moving from A to B with a laptop case, the idea of sharing vehicles gets a little more complicated. A good 4/5 of my friends have done some kind of modification to their cars, not adding spoilers or that nonsense, but changing how they work to do a job better than they did before. Add to it other tasks like towing equipment, pulling other vehicles loose from mud, plowing snow, on and on and this idea that no-emissions EV's are going to replace all of this is frankly stupid and shows once again the disconnect between a whole LOT of the US alone and I'd imagine elsewhere and the cities.

I'm not saying gas is forever, it is obviously going away and you'd be stupid to say otherwise. But to say that because Tesla and Chevrolet has made an admittedly perfectly good and arguably attractive alternative to the compact runabout used by a lot of city dwellers who hate driving anyway means that all gas powered cars are going away is fucking absurd. The only EV I know of capable of towing ANYTHING is the Tesla Model X, and even then it's towing capabilities have gotten extremely mixed reviews, ranging from complaints about the range absolutely plummeting when anything of substance is being moved, to the vehicle not handling the strain on the rear axle well.

I know I'm in the minority here on HN not living in a huge city with infrastructure aplenty who's ready to bail on cars forever, but seriously, there is so much ground to cover yet for EVs.

"This doesn't take into account, not even rural areas, but areas that are simply not metropolitan cities. "

The report takes that into consideration that's why it states that "95 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets". Simply, you fit in that 5% left.

What's going to happen to all the existing cars on the road in the next 8 years?

Mostly scrap. If you're in the market for a vehicle, do you take a gas-powered car with high operational and maintenance cost, or do you buy one with low costs?

Most people won't even buy, as it's cheaper and faster to rely on a self-driving vehicle that picks you up like a taxi would.

Existing cars are about as valuable in those scenarios as a horse and buggy.

Quite a few people were I live own trucks or SUVs. Also, we have buses here, but the only people who ride them are ones without cars. People do take Uber of course, but that's generally when they're not in a state to drive, or they don't have their car in walking distance.

"car in walking distance" is going to seem nonsensical very soon. These changes are predicated on autonomous vehicles.

I have a hard time seeing it be very soon outside of major cities, where "car in walking distance" has always been somewhat nonsensical given the ubiquitous public transportation.

So what is it about being autonomous that will change the game? Because taxis haven't made owning cars obsolete. I know exactly zero people who prefer taking a taxis over owning a car, although a few would be in favor of public train transportation .

It's not going to happen as fast as the report claims, but if it did I can only expect that these cars would be either "recycled" or sold to other countries where electric autonomous cars are still the future.

The US is about 4M square miles. So with 1M cars, you could cover every second grid point and have a car standing by within √2 miles of everyone. This is obviously impractical with human-driven taxis, but with self-driving taxis you could get there. The number of self-driving taxis to take every urban dweller to and from work would probably be around 20M, so covering the country would be only 5% extra.

Similar things to what you said were said about electricity and telephone service in the early 20th centure. Sure, you could provide it in cities, but the cost in the country would be prohibitive. But a combination of the right technologies and regulation promoting universal access made it happen.

> The US is about 4M square miles. So with 1M cars, you could cover every second grid point and have a car standing by within √2 miles of everyone. This is obviously impractical with human-driven taxis, but with self-driving taxis you could get there. The number of self-driving taxis to take every urban dweller to and from work would probably be around 20M, so covering the country would be only 5% extra.

This is flatly ridiculous. Yes mathematically sound but you're forgetting the concentrations of people vary extremely widely and so the demand for the cars would also vary extremely widely. And yes, you could then stack more in the urban areas but then we come back to the same problem: what company is going to operate the 5 or so that service my town, and why would anyone in my town use them versus their own already owned cars? And unless we plan to have some that are capable of pulling boats, moving equipment, towing trailers, and what have you you've addressed maybe 60% of traffic.

> Similar things to what you said were said about electricity and telephone service in the early 20th centure

Except the obstructions to getting phone and electrical service to the rural areas were a lack of funding and some difficult terrain in places, and a need for more switchboards. Show me an EV that can pull a trailer holding four horses (about 4 tons) a few hundred miles and I might believe you, but to my knowledge, that doesn't exist.

I think that the technical limitations of EVs (range, towing, etc.) are things that will not be overcome. I don't want to say it will be easy, but it will be a matter of a motivated company (or companies) applying resources to to solve a problem.

The far more wishful thinking part of the article is the idea of a retreat from ownership and on-demand vehicle usage. I'm sure it will be an option. Avis and Hertz will build fleets of summonable cars that you pay in a monthly fee and it picks you up and drops you off. That sounds great as a city dweller, but there are lots of parts of the country where that simply isn't tenable. I know of hundreds of towns in my state that have a population of less than 500 and are at least a hour drive from a town with more than 5000 people. No car company can fix that problem, and even if they create a great incentive to move to cities, that would be a glacial process, and that kind of migration would only make the idea less tenable for people that choose not to move to cities.

As you mention there is all the people that modify their vehicles, but even simpler--how many people with young children have a car seat semi-permanantly installed in their back seat?

And the other point I never see brought up when you see these pie-in-the-sky predictions--there were 254 million motor vehicles registered in the US in 2012. (1) There were 17.55 million light vehicle sales in 2016 (2). Obviously some of the 254 million are vehicles that would not get replaced in a migration to electric/autonomous, and some people would likely migrate to an on-demand model, but it certainly suggests that a complete cut-over in 8 years time would be very difficult especially for people living in poverty who today might be driving a 20 year old vehicle that they paid $1000 for, and can't afford a new vehicle, and may have reasons that an on-demand model wouldn't work for them (rural poor for example.)

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit... (2) http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-auto-sales-20...

There's a whole world out there outside of rural America. USA is #41 at 82.4% urbanization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country

Saying cars are going to be obsolete doesn't mean they'll all vanish overnight. Hell, some people still have horses around.

Still, those companies making ICE cars are fucked.

> There's a whole world out there outside of rural America.

I think you'll find rural America is actually the world outside most people's world, but I digress...

> USA is #41 at 82.4% urbanization:

By population, not the meaningful things when it comes to vehicles, which are distance and density. A car that can do 300 miles on a charge is perfectly fine when the furthest you drive is 30 minutes to get to the "good" grocery store, it isn't even close to taking on the full duties of vehicles that do upwards of 300 miles a DAY, none of which occur anywhere near a charging station.

Why in the world did this get downvoted? It's simply expressing an opinion contrary to the article's super optimistic timeline.

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