2. While the passenger is at work, the self-driving car will be giving rides to other people, or delivering packages and meals (not parking or driving around empty).
3. Greater car sharing means fewer parked cars, lower demand for parking and hence lower cost to park.
Says who? I certainly don't want random people inside my car when I'm not around. Don't really feel like having "For a good time call 867-5309" and a drawing of a penis gouged into my center console, and having the seatbacks tagged with magic marker. ("We're sorry to hear that, sir. We have credited your account with a $25 credit for your trouble.")
130 million people drive to work every day in the USA. Something like 115 million cars. There are maybe 200,000 taxis in the USA. If we put 1 million cars to work, we've still got 114 million sitting idle, or rather, doing loops around the block because it's cheaper.
> Greater car sharing
Says who? You can already carpool and have ALL of the advantages of a self-driving car, it's just Larry driving the car instead of Waymo. But as everyone on HN will tell you, they don't want to carpool, they want to ride alone. Riding with others is what poor people do.
You also have the economics totally backward. Your assertion is that driving will be better in every way - easier personally, less congestion, cheaper parking - and as a result, there will be less driving? Utterly backwards. Make something cheaper easier or better, and we use more of it, not less.
It's not your car, it's Waymo's car.
Waymo outfits the cars, provides continuous monitoring and support, operates a fleet of field techs for repair and cleaning, takes responsibility for insurance and regulatory compliance, provides dispatch and routing services, collects payments, etc.
The cost is justified by high utilization of the fleet. The economics don't work for a single car doing nothing 95% of the time.
Why would anyone want to own their own self-driver?
> Utterly backwards. Make something cheaper easier or better, and we use more of it, not less.
Yep, it's impossible to make anything cheaper, easier or better, because it instantly goes to shit when people want more of it.
Because they don't live in a large city for example. It's easier to cover a known average of rides with a million of users than when you have a town of 2000. You have a normal day where many projects walk to work, you get a local event where 200 people may turn to, you get forest fire where 2000 people need to get out.
Once you've implemented congestion pricing, riding with others is what 99% of people will be doing and the stigma is gone. If you don't want to ride in a car with graffiti etc. there'll be an option to order a better quality of ride.
As another commented, it will be a very interesting optimization problem to figure out how to efficiently use the underutilized time of the fleet. There are a lot of things which are done at peak times now only because the owner of the car has to physically drive it there that could easily be moved to non-peak.
As for the uniform thing, you are right, but it can be restated in economic terms as the car being more expensive to use during certain times of the day -- so people will have an incentive to go to work in off-peak hours (which will be an option not available to everybody, but the more that do so, the less the premium cost will be) thus smoothing demand.
Exactly. The salient questions are whether, at the point of minimum demand during the day, there would be more unutilized self-driven vehicles than the current state of unutilized owner-driven vehicles, and if at the point of maximum demand, there would be more or less vehicles on the road than today.
Intuitively, the answer is "no" to the first question, since cars used for commuting in the morning and evening could be used for deliveries during the day.
I don't know about the second question, and this probably has more to do with shifting trips from public transit to self-driven cars (not cruising to avoid paying to park).
This research doesn't consider the reduction in parking demand, the reduced cost to park, the densification from reclaiming thousands of hectares of parking spaces, offsetting traffic of current delivery vehicles, etc.
The illusion of control is a powerful one, and I think many people will choose to own and park a personal car near to their work so that they can get in it and get stuck in traffic immediately, rather than waiting at work while the car returns through said traffic.
If they do, it will be theirs, not doing random shit for who knows who.
Assuming the pricing works, most people will just use a car service.
They are called busses, and trains, and trams. And they are not gross in most of Europe, for example.
I think a lot of people will have much higher cost pressures than many of us on HN (at least, my impression is that we here are typically well above local median wages). That may push it a lot, and even more when you remove the upfront costs.
Also personally I'd love to not have to own a car. If it's even cheaper - great.
I don't believe that for one second. Assume that the average car costs $523/mo[1] (and if you wanted a lower car payment it's totally possible to get a cheap car with a lower monthly payment). That means the daily cost of the car is $17.19 (523*12/365).
An uber (which is often less than a taxi and way more convenient) costs about $15 to get to work if you live nearby (it would be closer to $30-40 if you lived in the suburbs), and another $15 to get back home (possibly more because of surge pricing, depending on when you leave and local events such as sports games etc). This is assuming you never want to drive to get groceries, visit friends, etc... That's another $10-15 each way, every time.
Sure you don't have to pay for gas but there's no way the <$1/ride increase will account for that. I suppose you might have to pay for parking, but even then you could just buy a cheaper car ($400/mo car payments aren't exactly unheard of) and use the difference to pay for monthly parking.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/31/a-523-monthly-payment-is-the...
a) the uber driver has much higher marginal cost on each drive than a self driving car because of the human in the drivers seat and
b) the self driving car is likely to have a much higher fixed cost than the taxi with a human driver because of the expensive computer, software and new hardware like lidar.
So self driving cars are in my best guess going to have very high fixed costs with very low marginal costs, which means there is a large opportunity for a “renters” market
But if I had something fancy, like a Tesla Model X, the daily cost (similar parameters as before) works out to $68/day, and then I could save money by using Uber.
Of course, that's not really a fair comparison because the Tesla is much nicer than anything Uber is likely to pick me up in, so the Prius is a much more honest comparison.
Would you pay 10x to avoid having to share seats, particularly for an activity that's still a fairly large chunk of the household budget?
Switch to electric vehicles (which are suddenly feasible with the car-service, never-have-to-park model!) and centralize maintenance across a whole fleet of cars and you can shave a bunch off gas & maintenance, though your depreciation would probably go up unless battery packs became dirt cheap.
From this statement it seems like you either don't work in a city, or live outside of a large metropolitan area. There's little chance you're leaving stuff in your car routinely in a large city and not having it stolen. This isn't meant as an insult, but I think it means you're not in the target demographic for a shared self-driving car service.
"Loaded with my stuff" doesn't mean all of my favorite consumer electronics left in the open in the passenger's seat.
My behavior barely changed between living a mile away from the nearest person to parking daily in SF. Yes if I have something valuable in the cabin I'll put it in the trunk when I leave the car, but that's it.
The best analogy would be insurance for historical or classic vehicles; if you've ever looked into it, not only do they require certain things normal car insurance doesn't (for instance, they will typically only insure you if your car is kept in an enclosed garage), but because the pool of drivers is much smaller, it is more expensive to get.
Why would it increase the rates?
Rates are mostly driven by statistical analysis taking risk of accidents and cost of repairs into consideration. It is not a product particularly fit for a volume discount. If anything, fewer drivers on the road should mean fewer accidents, if the area/volume of roads stays the same (because of the drop in density, which means a drop in probability to be in the same spot as another driver at a given time).
> The best analogy would be insurance for historical or classic vehicles; if you've ever looked into it, not only do they require certain things normal car insurance doesn't (for instance, they will typically only insure you if your car is kept in an enclosed garage), but because the pool of drivers is much smaller, it is more expensive to get.
I don't think it's due to the pool of drivers being smaller. I think it's because the incident cost is much higher than high volume cars, because both parts and labor are more expensive for low volume productions (custom/exotic). Source: my exotic car.