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Comment by smolsky | Hacker News Reader

It's cheap in NorCal - my friend had a Model 3 delivered by a dude. Literally. A dude drove his car to his house and then called Uber.

P.S. by "dude" I meant that the man just drove the car to the owner's place from their Fremont factory (30 min).

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How else would you deliver a car? Not sure what point you're trying to make?

You would download it, obviously

Truck?

Put the car on a truck and then drive the truck? Might as well just drive the car?

The beautiful thing about trucks is...you can put _multiple_ cars on the truck.

Eh... Delivering multiple cars over a short distance by loading them up on a flatbed or car hauler just doesn't make any sense. Tow trucks will always be more expensive than calling a taxi. Especially given that this is basically a textbook example of the travelling salesman problem. And I don't mean computing a route is hard, I just mean that in practice while there's overlap between destinations for a sparse set of e.g. 10 destinations spread evenly over some area around a hub it's not like being able to go between destinations directly makes it 10x shorter. Trucks are expensive to maintain and operate, much more so than a regular passenger car. Trucks also can't deliver as easily or to as many places as a person driving it. If someone lives down a dead end road that's extremely inconvenient for the truck whereas it's a non-issue for someone driving.

Car haulers don't make sense for sparse local deliveries.

Handy if you're buying multiple cars.

Just think of it as Uber Pool/Lyft Line wherein one car goes to your house, and another goes to someone else's house.

How many cars do you buy at the same time?!

And increase risk of road damage/wear in transit, which likely wouldn't be caught on initial inspection during handover.

There's something intangible about being the first to drive a new car. Doesn't make any logical sense, but there is.

You will never be the first driver of a car, even if it comes straight from the factory to your front door. Every car gets test driven after assembly before it gets sent out, though they might not have the odometer turned on.

Surely all cars have been pre-driven, even if in the factory.

Auto Pilot

I know someone who had a huge problem with Tesla over this. The issue was the Tesla contract wanted my friend to take ownership of the car, and thus responsibility as soon as it left Tesla. For obvious reasons, that's not something anyone should do. They had quite a bit of back and forth until Tesla changed the wording. I'm not sure if they did it universally though.

Then Tesla registered the car improperly and took months to correct.

Most Tesla owners I talk to say the same thing, they love the car and hate everything else about dealing with Tesla. I can't imaging removing dealerships is going to make this any better with customers.

What would it have been if not a dude?

A dudette?

The car driving itself?

"Welcome to Johnny Cab"

Hell of a day, isn't it?

Dude implies something about how he was dressed and acted. If someone in a 3 piece suit delivers your car, that's less insulting.

That.... doesn’t sound shady. At all.

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