The economics of this are the opposite. Having cars sit unused in driveways and parking spots, and be maintained by non-experts, is highly inefficient. Just like cloud infrastructure, it is more efficient to centralize and rent out capacity as needed.
That said, a lot of people (such as people who lose money driving for Uber) don't really properly account for their per-mile costs. I expect a lot of people would think twice about their driving habits if they had to feed a meter at 50 cents per mile every time they got in the car. (And, yes, that number includes some amortization of fixed costs, will be lower some day with electrics, and is probably lower today with an econobox--but the point stands..)
It’s still cheaper.
That's the cost I'm talking about. The maintenance cost of raw sitting time (rust, freeze-thaw cycles, etc.) are additional.
Per mechanic friends, most better cars go until about 250k miles with modest maintenance issues, and after that things like transmissions fail and are not a good value.
The problem with the pooling is that any outlier blows the financial model. Whatever interest I would make would be wiped out by a single event where I’d need to rent a car.
There’s a place for things like Uber (or traditional taxis) and zip car. But unless you barely use a vehicle or cannot afford one, it’s a pain in the ass to share.
- Insurance. Some policies have surcharges or discounts based on mileage but it's mostly an annual cost for a typical driver. (Plus excise tax and state inspection.)
- In northern states, corrosion due to salt in the winter happens even if you don't drive a car many miles. My Honda dealer is always amazed when I bring in my old '97 Del Sol with minimal rust; I've just garaged it in the winter for about the past decade.
- Some fluid, belt, etc. maintenance is time-based
- If you want to have a relatively late model car then of course that's a time-based cost. But, if you hold onto a car until it becomes unreliable/expensive to operate then you're back to auto costs being mostly a result of mileage.
AAA publishes car ownership cost numbers. But the big challenge of quantifying this in general is that the relatively fixed component is a lot more for someone who gets a new leased vehicle every three years vs. someone who owns a car for 10-15 years and 150K miles.
They don't salt the roads in the winter in Silly-Valley so maintenance costs are primarily mileage based.
In somewhere like NY it's going to be more time based because the vehicle will corrode at a fairly steady rate and salt solutions will counteract lubricants in places that can't be cleaned out (e.g. wheel bearings and ball joints) at a fairly fixed rate.
Cloud infrastructure is probably a bad example. It essentially got started at the same time as x64 virtualization was becoming a thing, so you had people comparing the cost of operating 25 physical servers to what Amazon charges for 25 virtual machines and then the virtual machines are obviously a better deal.
But one VM host can run all 25 VMs, and if you operate it locally then the latency is much lower (<1ms vs. ~40ms), there is much more local bandwidth (symmetric gigabit or 10G vs. 50Mbps/20Mbps or whatever your site's internet link is), you don't have to pay anyone for those bytes, local servers are still accessible when Comcast is down, your data stays on site instead of being stored who-knows-where accessible to who-knows-who, etc.
There are use cases for cloud hosting, high volume static web hosting being the major one because then the data is public, the users aren't local and (this is the main reason) last mile ISPs charge uncompetitive prices for fast WAN connections. But people massively overuse it for other things. Companies that put the local file/print server in The Cloud are doing it wrong.
If it were more cost effective to rent cars, we’d be going to Hertz every month. By the time you build in the overhead, profit, risk, etc, you always pay more. A middle of the road car costs <$0.60/mile to operate, insure, fuel and maintain. Uber is easily 10x that, even with Uber losing money on almost every ride.
I’ve been in the business of centralizing technology services for twenty years now. It’s a clear cost savings when you’re offering something that is a commodity that can obtained on the open market. It’s clearly cheaper to rent email. If you have the volume and capital, it’s clearly cheaper to own the fiber between facilities.
Outsourcing business process is only cheaper as long as your use profile is static — the change orders kill you. Transportation and people are similar to that. Taking the bus to work is often a money-saver. But paying a $30 uber tax or overpaying for Amazon groceries is just a drag. A family of 4 probably saves enough in paper towels alone to make 1 car payment.
1. Driverless Uber means that you don't have to pay for an expensive human driver 2. I expect that the number of driverless taxis will be far more than the current number of taxis+Ubers/Lyfts, because suppliers are limited only by the capital costs of the cars. 2. As a passenger relying on driverless taxis, you no longer have to pay car insurance. 3. You no longer have to pay for parking. 4. You no longer have to find parking. 5. Businesses will no longer have to pay for parking. 6. You don't have to pay Uber for the entire trip -- you can get a taxi from home to a bus stop or light rail station.
The benefit of renting a driverless taxi over owning a car is that most commuters are only using their cars for an hour or two a day. This turns car renting into a by-the-hour spot market, which is far more granular than renting a Hertz car for a month.
But I think that freedom from parking will be the really big incentive that pushes driverless cars forward. Cars are really big, land in cities is really scarce, and car storage is a really wasteful use of land. We currently have homes and malls and offices surrounded by miles of parking[1]. I expect most of that parking to go away within a decade or two of driverless cars becoming popular, as owners reclaim it for more profitable uses of the land. And without abundant free parking, driverless cars & taxis will become more popular.
1. https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/app/uploads/2...
If you Uber everywhere, you need to pay someone else to drive you around all the time, that wipes out any possible cost savings.
Get rid of the cost of the person driving you and it will almost certainly be cheaper to rent than buy unless you have a very high utilization rate for the car.
Add in surge pricing, surcharges for dead-ending routes, etc and you have a cab. Useful, but inferior to controlling the car.
I think people are also over-focusing on monetary costs; there are lots of other considerations like convenience, cleanliness, predictability, reliability, and finally social status and taste.
In the limit of a high utilization rate (i.e., the increased fraction of the time the car is driving, which is probably 5-10), the capital costs are roughly given by the interest rate compounded over the lifetime of the car. Even at just 2% interest, this means a 21% savings if you would otherwise buy a new car every decade.
> I think people are also over-focusing on monetary costs;
I definitely wasn't suggesting capital costs will be the most important effects, I was just pointing out that an effective 20% discount on car purchase price is non-negligible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940795
I described a procedure for a rideshare co-op in which the members provide their own capital, which, from a capital cost perspective, is a clear win (>20%) compared to the status quo of individually owned cars. The members may in addition decide it's even better for outside investors to provide the capital in exchange for the members paying a monthly fee, but this means the total benefit to members is even larger than the member-capitalized co-op scenario.
The guy who owns the car, the guy who provides the software to drive it and the money guy all need their piece of the action.