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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

> When it comes time to buy my next car I'll probably end up going to traditional car dealerships, looking around, test driving, and picking something through a traditional channel. It's just the path of least resistance and there's a lot more variety.

I believe Tesla is gearing up for the car purchase after your next one. You're currently thinking in terms of a car that you'll be driving. For those cars, you're right, there are other car manufacturers that will be more successful.

However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change. Market leaders of today will be up-ended. That's when I believe Tesla, Google, and anyone else who has driverless technology will take over the industry.

That goes double for the taxi companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, etc.

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However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change.

This may be true, but nothing I have seen so far suggests that ubiquitous full automation will arrive until long after the likes of Tesla and Uber have run out of money. From here, it looks like we still have several rounds to go for each of

- Can we actually do it?

- Will the regulators let us do it?

- Will the public believe we can do it and trust us to do it safely?

That assumes there are no black swan events undermining the whole car industry in the meantime. Given the increasing population and congestion issues in many big cities, the corresponding increasing interest in planning/zoning policy so that using cars to get around is less essential, and the environmental implications of this kind of vehicle even if it's a hybrid or totally electrically powered locally, I think there's also a slight chance that demand for this kind of technology will never reach critical mass at all.

I've read plenty of traditional manufacturers working on self-driving cars too. They just don't seem to be as visible as Google/Uber/Tesla etc.

I've been following Audi for some time. [1]

[1] http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/alba...

That's mostly because they are sensitive to brand damage in ways that Uber and Tesla (not Google) are not.

Mercedes or Volvo getting caught with a product in the ways Tesla has been getting caught would be unacceptable to their customers. The brand damage would be massive. Tesla as 'the new kid on the block' has a lot of leeway to mess up that you would never accept from an established brand. The whole autopilot saga is an excellent example.

By the time Volvo or Mercedes release a next level self driving car you can simply expect it to work, all the time. Until then they will release small incremental steps on their 'driver assist' technology.

I'm sorry but that's just flat out wrong. Just last year Mercedes advertised their blatently inferior (compared to Tesla's AP1 at the time) driving-assist features as literally "Self-driving" and saw NONE of the backlash that Tesla faced with the autopilot accident. And Tesla has never advertised their current or former Autopilot as being "Self-driving".

I think the opposite is happening - that Tesla is under much more scrutiny because they're the new one on the block. Because the established automakers have done some terrible shit, which would absolutely kill Tesla as a company.

I'll gladly find sources and further elaborate, if you're interested.

What their marketing department yells versus what they deliver has a huge gap, what I'm talking about is not the marketing part but the actual tech. I'm not aware of MB or Volvo getting into the kind of crashes that Tesla has been having.

This insidious definition of Uber as a taxi company must be highlighted. Their entire business model is based on them insisting they are not a taxi company and as such the taxi laws do not apply to them. Everyone knows this is horseshit and when there's no focus on it , just calls Uber a taxi company and ignores cheerily the devastating effect Uber has on the rule of law. What would remain of society if every company could pick which regulations they want to keep and which ones they don't?

Well, Paypal's been getting away with pretending to not be a bank for over a decade now...

They're not a taxi company. They do not take street hails and as such, their regulation needs are different. For example, there's no need (or at least less need) for the government to regulate fares since people trust the Uber app to give them a fair price (whereas if you're a tourist and you were to just hop into a random unregulated car you hailed, it would be difficult to tell if you were getting a fair price).

They are functionally equivalent to a taxi company and should be treated as such.

Honestly, ordering an Uber on a mobile app is the current-day equivalent of a street hail of a Yellow Cab (or other legitimately licensed, metered, and branded taxicab)

It's not solely about price. It's also about safety of the car and driver.

People and companies have always broken laws. Why is it especially a crisis when "disruptive" tech companies dare the law to stop them?

> However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change. Market leaders of today will be up-ended. That's when I believe Tesla, Google, and anyone else who has driverless technology will take over the industry.

> That goes double for the taxi companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, etc.

The interesting thing is that you didn’t mention Mercedes Benz.

Mercedes Benz owns a few carsharing and Taxi apps in Europe, almost all Taxi operators lease cars from Mercedes Benz (which, in return, gets better deals with them), Mercedes Benz licensed the entire Tesla IP and has used it already in one model, and they’ve got their own electric cars and self-driving prototypes as well as self-driving trucks.

Mercedes Benz is the most likely candidate to build a vertically integrated Taxi solution. They’ve got deals with all major cities, with Taxi operators, they own the IP, they’ve got the apps and the infrastructure, and they’ve got the required prototypes.

And that in my opinion will be the ultimate nail in '3rd party apps' for mobility. In the end, the car manufacturers own the hardware and will easily take over the market once the elephants have started dancing.

GM is invested in Lyft and Mercedes Benz has their Car2go division. Seems to me that the traditional car companies have a reasonable head start into the autonomous "transporation as service" area as Tesla does, just from another direction first.

Will I even be buying the next car after this one? Most people own cars for 8 to 10 years. We could be looking at rental cars in the future by that point rather than outright ownership.

From what Elon Musk writes, his plan is that either you'll be renting other people's cars, or making some extra money by renting out your own: https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

Already now Leasing contracts enable exactly this. Every odd years you will get a new car but you pay basically for the access to the vehicle not the car itself.

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