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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

In the long run, they're screwed anyway. Electric cars are less dramatic, so tolerances are going to be tighter. Maintenance is going to be automated and automated means centralized. Baring intervention on the owner's part, cars are just going to self-drive an half an hour away to get serviced when their owner is asleep or at work.

Also, just realized who I was replying to.

Thanks for all the things you've written over the years Ben. When I was first getting back into tech your presentation on split testing was invaluable and your articles and HN comments are always great.

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You're conflating electric cars and self-driving in a big way.

Or, maybe in a good/optimistic way.

The thought that cars will run their own "personal errands" when the users are not needing the cars is fantastic, and honestly, an obvious thing I had never thought of.

A couple things will be interesting when self driving cars are a full reality:

* Car drives over to the store and a worker loads it up with the items you purchased

* Car is added to an Uber Fleet when youre not needing it and makes you a few dollar per hour.

* Car gets washed/serviced autonomously

* Car monotnously drives around in killing time/parks free-far-away when your in a Financial District and parking isnt available

* Car is shared between multiple families/households.

* Apartment complexes have a dedicated shared car schedulable for use by tenants.

Given those scenarios, it looks like traffic pricing, as currently used in Singapore, for example, would need to become much more widespread for the society to properly share road resource.

I believe that will be a reality for electric cars regardless of self driving features. Its the essential next step is allocating vehicle costs correctly. Right now gas taxes take care of some of the allocation, but that obviously wont work in the future.

All of those are independent of how the car is powered.

"powered" sure, but I was talking about the cars being relatively self-driving...

How many gas powered self driving cars are they making?

Exactly as many as EV cars: 0

As far as I can tell, most of Waymo's fleet is gas-powered. They bought 62,000 hybrid minivans, and hybrids are gas-powered. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/31/w...

When you reach that stage of technology, why own a car at all ? By Ubering/Renting/Leasing into a fleet of autonomous cars, you get all of that with the addition of:

* Be able to chose the car for your immediate present needs (car/truck/sport)

* Have a car anywhere in the world

* Save money as you no longer need private parking space in your property.

Also most likely the cost of private car ownership is likely going to increase to the domain of luxury.

First because car manufacturer will want a piece of the fleet pie (see Volvo) and that will be a disputed market between Manufacturer/Uber-like/Rental Companies.

Then government are going to like fleets. Working with a few large partners is going to make stuff like dynamic traffic management doable, cities will be able to enforce very strict policies, and minimise the space allocated to car. For example in the EU they are destroying public parking space in the cities, do not allow building of private parking space either for offices or houses.

So car manufacturer won't want to sell you car and government won't want you to own one - good luck :-)

Eh, there are successful niche manufacturers now, I imagine there will always be someone willing to sell you your own vehicle for the indefinite future, at a price at least as low as today and probably lower.

I like these ideas, but they call come at the cost of the availability of the car, and I don't know how often people will actually do them. Let's say you send your car off, and it does an errand for you and is due back at 11:30, so you can take it out for lunch at noon. Now the car gets stuck in traffic, or the weather turns bad, and the car can't return until 12:15. That's frustrating. Likewise, say you send it off to drive around until you need it at 5. However, everyone else is also doing that, and there's a huge traffic jam at the entrance to the financial district, and your car doesn't actually show up until 5:30, causing you to miss you dinner reservations.

I've owned an unreliable car, that didn't start every time, and it totally sucked.

You don't have to rely on just your car.

Think cattle, not pets.

It just seems like a car is the wrong form factor for all of these tasks. Or more importantly, doing all of theses task atomically using cars as the atoms is awfully inefficient and cumbersome. So much capital and physical resource goes into manufacturing cars, and to then use a lumbering metal cage to pick up groceries when transporting a human is no longer a requirement seems silly.

There is also the issue that car infrastructure dominating humans living spaces and running out of space has become an increasing issue and EV/vehicle automony only embeds the issue deeper into our societies practices. We should be finding ways to replace cars.

Disclaimer, I come from rural South Australia and would have found it very difficult to live without a car due to the long distances involved and complete lack of public transportation outside of the (only) city center. So I empathize with the rural need for cars. But the majority of people who would buy an autonomous EV are not going to be rural, and probably have better alternatives.

To make my writing tighter I sometimes take liberties by assuming that my audience can connect a thought (or observe a pun) without me needing to delve into the details.

So when I wrote "In the long run" I thought I could rely on HN readers to connect the idea that electric cars will fully replace fossil fuel ones and that self-driving will be ubiquitous.

You're welcome.

I believe that that presentation on A/B tests has had more of an impact than anything else that I've written. :-)

>Baring intervention on the owner's part, cars are just going to self-drive an half an hour away to get serviced when their owner is asleep or at work

oooh I didn't even consider that, an excellent idea. I hope this comes to fruition.

At that point it will be pointless to even own the car. Might as well just subscribe to 'Mercedes Prime' for $500/month and have their automated vehicles available on demand.

Exactly. The entire industry realizes the shift to a subscription is coming and getting here fast.

As a city dweller I got rid of owning a car in 2015. Now I just hop in someone elses car using a ride sharing app if I'm going a short distance. If I am going a long distance I can rent someone elses car, either from a company that owns a fleet or from an individual using Turo / GetAround.

In SF you can rent a car to drive somewhere using Uber's GetAround integration for as little as $8/hour. Crazy.

The rental price quoted above (500USD/month) is probably near the average price I’ve paid to buy a car... I hope subscription is kind of less than this otherwise it seems like pretty bad news for the average consumer.

The pilot programs we see now are sort of a month-to-month lease and include maintenance and periodic vehicle swaps from a pool, much like you can often swap your short-term rental in the midst of a contract. That might appeal to the type of driver who doesn't keep their car in immaculate condition for the duration of their lease or ownership.

I would expect to see market segmentation not only by model but by average car age and care standards, so the fleet operator can potentially demote cars from one tier to another to get more service life out of them. I imagine you will see budget subscriptions that are more likely drawing from a pool of 3-6 year old cars and more premium subscriptions that are drawing from a pool of almost new cars, as well as potential tiers in between.

Why is it bad news?

I have no insurance to pay.

I have no fuel costs to pay.

I have no parking costs to pay.

I have no maintenance costs to pay.

I have a car whenever I want, for an affordable price, that is relatively modern, sometimes with a driver and sometimes I drive myself.

The true cost of a vehicle is much higher than the car payment.

On the other hand you've now added a whole new layer of friction to using a car. Sure, in theory you'll just hit a button on an app and a car will show up in a few minutes, and it's only a minor inconvenience. But what happens if there is a bug in the software? Or if your account at the giant fleet company gets suspended out of the blue for an opaque reason?

There's also the loss of being able to buy and customize a car that's exactly what the end user wants. This doesn't matter at all to a lot of drivers, but matters a great deal to some.

Your second argument is akin to people wanting to build a house instead of financing and buying an existing house.

For alot of car buying folks, the financing and available inventory determines the 'want'.

What happens when I lose my key?

What happens when I drink too much before needing to go home?

What happens if my car gets hit in the parking lot or broken into and I need to deal with calling the cops and trying to obtain the security camera footage before leaving?

The truth is no solution is without problems.

The transportation as a service model has more pros for me than cons. Plus it would mean fewer cars on the road overall and less need for parking spaces when autonomous vehicles can take us places and no longer need to be parked to wait for us.

Remember, not everyone lives near a city center...

This is true but becoming less true over time.

Though it will be interesting to see if self-driving cars reverse that trend. If a long commute becomes a pleasurable chunk of me-time instead of a grueling slog staring at the brake lights in front of you, maybe people won't place such a premium on living close to work.

for density in cities to increase, more public transport is simply needed.

Cars are a terrible way to get around in a crowded city. The city is far too dense to drive easily, cars take up way too much precious space and are huge increasers of smog.

In germany and other european cities, they already started banning diesel and other high pollution vechiles from entering major city centers because of both smog and congestion issues.

This kind of ruling will only increase.

EVs will address some of these objections. Autonomous driving will take care of the rest.

Uber and Lyft already have subscription plans. This is exactly the direction car transportation is already headed, at least for many drives.

So does Volvo. https://www.volvocars.com/us/shopping-tools/purchase/care-by...

This is just leasing with a different name, non-negotiable price, and insurance baked in. In many ways that's an improvement but it's disingenuous for Volvo to call it a subscription.

I hope not. I hope the car that I paid for becomes simpler, so that I can repair it myself or at a local shop. That would also mean that I get to own the software the car runs. It's sad when actually owning something sounds like an insane fever dream.

It may become simpler in some regards (drive train with fewer moving parts) but I think you can take your mind off the "do it yourself" part. The SW and electronics are always proprietary with little chance you'll ever (legally) have access to them. If anything their situation will get a lot worse as "always connected" cars become more common. Most likely trying to change/mod anything there will be detected and trigger some reaction that could go all the way to flagging your car as no longer street legal.

And what's left for you to repair? The simplicity you ask for will be introduced exactly where these home repairs used to happen: oil, filters, spark-plugs, a hose here, a cap there, etc. But the rest of the car stays mostly the same or gets even more complex. Most mechanical parts that aren't touched by the transition from ICE to electric motor could stay the same (suspensions, brakes), while the interior electronics will become more or less the equivalent of today's smartphones. Too complex for most people to try fixing themselves.

That's a good point about most of the home repairs we do being replaced by... not having those parts in the first place.

Hmm, a car that phones home to tattle on the owner? I forsee a strong future market for 'classic' vehicles. And 'disconnect service', ha!

"It's sad when actually owning something sounds like an insane fever dream."

That's where it's going, my friend!

Some people really think so. Take a step back and look at Average Joe, and I think privately owned vehicles aren't going away. Ever.

The idea that you'd even have a personal self-driving car is probably an insane fever dream already. We seem to be going in a direction where you'll hail cars as needed from a fleet someone else owns.

To me maintaining it is a hassle. I don't care about fixing it, I explicitly do not want to fix it, I also don't care about the software it runs. A car is a tool like a stove to me, I only care that the stove works. Fixing or maintaining it is not in any way interesting or worthwhile it's just a means to get from A to B. If there is transit I would take that instead, but if I have to own a car I would rather own one that simply works and otherwise stays out of my way and is not a hassle.

Who says that you need to own it either? Perhaps you just subscribe to a car service like zipcar or somesuch and you text msg the car to drive over to you when you need it, and when it's not being used or books it goes off to get itself serviced and whatnot. Sounds great to me.

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