Owning a Car Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse | Hacker News Reader

Owning a Car Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse

nytimes.com

35 pointsmistersquid79 comments

This article is ridiculous. Sure for urbanite hipsters who just grab a Bird scooter, but for the rest of us in the non-trendy parts of the country or who live in the suburbs, a car is absolutely essential for living a modern life. More rent-seeking to get those perpetually rent-happy Millenials I guess?

Who wants to wait for a rideshare when:

1. We're all snowed in but mom-to-be needs medicine/insulin?

1. Its time to go give birth...baby's here early!

1. You have 3 children and equivalent amounts of diaper bags/soccer outfits/bookbags and the schedule between school getting out and soccer practice starting is quite close

1. You get a call, grandpa's taken a turn for the worse, get here bc he's gonna die in <1 hr

These examples are not perfect, they are just what I could get off the top of my head, but c'mon, until we have People-Mover style monorails and/or Hyperloops everywhere, you will need a vehicle of your own control IE ownership.

To assert you can get full control over something you don't own is something I would disagree with.

Even taking that to a more 'day to day' degree:

1. I live near the coast. I want to go surfing, but not sure where. Is my rideshare or autonomous car going to drive me around checking out different breaks to see what waves are good?

2. How about when I get out of the water, does it keep my change of clothes with it? Many times I take a couple boards with me cause I'm not sure which board is right for the conditions. And wtf do I do with my phone? Dont tell me its waterproof cause salt water for 2hrs at a time == destroy just about anything other than fiberglass.

3. What autonomous car is taking me camping? Sure I dont touch my car much once I'm done setting up camp, but I sure load it up and grab stuff from time to time out of it.

4. I need some 10' 2x4s from Home Depot, some plywood and also a bunch of bags of soil. Whats my best option here?

5. Going back to the beach thing.. how about taking my kids to the beach? That's a shitshow of a mess.. which autonomous or ride share is going to work best? Cause carseats + sand + water to rinse off + snacks + towels.. omg all the crap we bring and need to take home.

For anyone who enjoys the outdoors, the autonomous/ride share thing just isnt anywhere close. Same for anyone with kids. Same for anyone who does projects with large-ish materials (aka runs to Home Depot).

This was my thought - I mountain bike for fun. Maybe it will drive itself but having a car/truck with the necessary setup for my bike/camping is part of my transportation requirements that I've not seen addressed yet.

For infrequent trips like camping or picking up Home Depot stuff, you rent a large vehicle. I used to live near a Zipcar garage for these types of trips.

Home Depot already rents trucks. Although 10' stock fits in a Civic.

Home Depot, U Haul, etc. charge by the mile in addition to by the day. Useless for long trips.

> 4. I need some 10' 2x4s from Home Depot, some plywood and also a bunch of bags of soil. Whats my best option here?

This may actually be a good case for car sharing. If I could call up pickup truck to my door whenever I need, it'd be much cheaper / more efficient than getting a ride to a truck rental place and doing the same.

Ride share falls apart for this of course, but if the truck can deliver itself to my door? I'm all in.

Urbanite hipsters don't enjoy nature. They read about it on buzzfeed while drinking lattes.

A couple more:

1. A hurricane is coming and we need to evacuate!

2. We want to pack a family's worth of luggage and take a sight seeing roadtrip of the US.

3. Sure would be nice to visit my parents who live in rural America where no planes/trains/busses go.

4. There exist bad parts of town that police, cabs, and Uber refuse to go. How will people who live in those areas even go anywhere? Walk 10 blocks so that they can hopefully find a Bird scooter to drive the doctor?

I feel like this author is ignorant about the conditions of many Americans. I don't see at all how owning a car will be considered "quaint" when our modern lives are built around owning a vehicle.

There's so many safety issues that arise from not owning your own transportation. Ignoring those, there will need to be a lifestyle/cultural shift to remove transportation independence from most Americans. And ignoring that, you'll still need to be okay with giving your freedom of movement to a private company. Better hope Uber/Lyft/Bird/etc don't ban you, or you're really screwed.

re 2) rent a nice large van! Don't put the wear on your vehicle!

I used to do that until two rentals broke down, the second being quite scary and leaving me and my family stranded. Hertz and Sixt. Do you have a local rental place or something?

With my own car, I'm constantly keeping an eye for everything + regular maintenance.

  rent a nice large van!

Typically $100/day without mileage limits.

I've actually done this! It worked out mostly well, though it's a perk reserved for us people at or over 25 years old :)

The fact is most people in major urban centers do all of those things. In fact most people in many countries do all of those things sans cars. It is principally in america which has glutted itself on heavily subsidized oil priced without external costs baked into it that this isn't the case.

I think it's more because America is huge and there's a lot of ground to cover. It's impossible for public transportation and private services to fill that gap.

I think people truly do not understand just how large the United States is. I've been on several family road trips with my wife and two kids all across the country, from west to east, north and south, and back again. The country is huge. If you're a young'un who's only ever experienced life in a city or suburb, you really have no idea just how big this country is.

china is huge yet most people don't have cars. It's not the geographic size it's because its population is spread out thin due to post ww2 american dream urban planning where we built rings upon rings of suburbs surrounding urban cars because we did not think of any of the negative consequences of everyone having cars (among other things)

I'm not arguing your overall point - but simply walking through the snow to the plowed road and a ready to go vehicle sounds nicer than being forced to shovel the whole driveway/windrow, assuming that rideshare will actually show up.

Clickbait necessitates hyperbolic headlines. I think the reasonably likely thing that will happen is that many dual car households drop to single car households.

Most of the world gets by fairly well with much lower car ownership rates than the US (apart from San Merino which has more cars than people, the US has the highest car ownership per capita in the world). If you live in a country with very good public transportation, I think it's not hard at all to imagine a future in which individual car ownership basically goes to 0% at some point in that not too distant future.

Yes and no; car ownership in many parts of the world is tied to development, and as standard of living rises in many parts of the world, so does car ownership. (Not that I’m saying this is a good thing, to be clear.)

I live in a part of my country with very dense public transportation and I can't imagine car ownership disappearing; even with a dense public transportation network, there's too many commutes that can't easily be done in public transportation. And that's ignoring people who have to carry stuff as part of their work and use cars to store them.

I had twins join my toddler to give us a family of five recently. The logistics, prep, timing, etc is crazy now. We got a minivan. Not something I even thought about when we were just three, let alone newly married or single.

Yeah I'm really worried about this kind of total disassociation with the rest of the country. Another commenter in another thread said we should remove the electoral college to ensure the coastal cities control the outcome of the country..

Have none of y'all heard of rental cars? Just a few weeks ago, I missed my morning flight from SF to LA and was told the next one wasn't until later that night, so I opened my phone, booked a rental car, took a Lyft to the pickup spot, and just drove myself the rest of the way down for the weekend.

I would imagine that a world in which fewer people are buying cars would also lead to one in which there are more options for different lifestyles. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of randomly picking up an electric scooter off the street was a novel one. Now there are multiple unicorns putting them everywhere. Getaround/Turo/ZipCar are already things, and I imagine they'll just become more widely adopted/less expensive in the future.

Yet people still find use in horses in rural parts of the country.

There are parts of the America, vast regions in fact, where owning a car for individual use will remain an important part of life for years to come. Electric or combustion, owning a vehicle with complete agency over it will remain a strong part of the lifestyle.

I say that as someone who is trying to ditch the car and replace it with a bike and who thinks cars should be removed from city centres so I am not at all pro-car. It is just a requirement of modern rural life to be able get yourself around long distances.

>Yet people still find use in horses in rural parts of the country.

that's why the title says "as rare as owning horses"

Many people will own cars, but not nearly as many as now.

>>Many people will own cars, but not nearly as many as now.

This is a meaningless prediction without context or specificity provided by the author. The author is saying that cars will be owned by .6% of the population (current horse ownership is aprox 2 million) in her lifetime. "Many" but "less than now" could mean that we go 263.6 to 240 and meet your criteria wall falling miles short of what this insane article is positing.

No. As countless responses have pointed out, the amount of infrastructural challenges for non-urban hubs is staggering. We already have buses and cabs, and we even have "smart" buses and cabs with APPS and there still isn't a way that you can expect rural Alabama or Suburban Wisconsin to be able to deal with this non-car type existence.

This is getting pointless quibble-y, but they said "not nearly as many as now" not "less than now." 263.6 is nearly as many as 240 by any sensible definition; I took them to be suggesting a significant decrease for some common-sense definition of "significant."

My point was that it isn't quaint, it's practical and useful. A unique tool for a unique requirement of our modern society. Calling it quaint is showing how out of touch the author is.

Don't get me wrong. I hope she is right. I hope cars go away. But I just don't see how they could for rural citizens. Maybe part of her prediction requires that people move closer to the cities. A real possibility.

A lot of horse ownership is quaint. Just given the fact that 2/3 of the population of the US lives on 1/30th of the land area, the tiny fraction of the urban and dense-suburban population that quaintly own horses will dwarf the rural population that owns working horses.

The title should really be "Owning a Car For City Dwellers Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse". I live in a suburb in the Midwest, and taking an Uber or Lyft to work every day is simply not fiscally wise, even taking into account insurance, maintenance, and gas.

Hell, I live in a suburb in a pretty major tech hub with a 15 minute commute from work and even then it doesn’t make fiscal sense to get rid of my vehicle. Commuting via rideshare just to work and back (without even taking into account the grocery trips etc that would be required without a car) would cost me about $300 a month. That’s being extremely conservative, assuming no surges and minimal tipping, and assuming I do literally nothing but commute back and forth. My insurance, fuel and routine maintenance on my vehicle doing everything in my life (not just commuting to and from work, but also shopping and whatever recreational activities on weekends) is still less than that.

I agree that a renting car by the hour is not fiscally responsible, but neither is owning a car in the really long run. I do have a beautiful bikepath all the way to work, and being carless saves more than $300 per month, sure I spend it on other things, but I buy time with friends and family using that money.

To a large degree that's because the cost is far higher to pay a human to do the driving.

In a world of self-driving cars, more of them can be stations geographically close to where they may be needed - without having to pay for a human driver.

So they will become both cheaper and easier/quicker to use than existing ride-share services. That will change the calculus for many many people - but not necessarily everyone, of course.

There's nothing in there that explains how we'll get away from car ownership. In order for car ownership to be a thing of the past, we'll need a cheaper option. But what?

Wait 10 min for an uber to arrive everytime i need to go to work? Not happening in this country, that's for sure.

Flying cars will probably never arrive, the regulations won't allow it. Maybe Autonomous cars could do it, but they are another 20 to 40 years into the future: maybe then.

A car costs about $6000 per year, so about $30 per workday. That makes sense if your Uber costs about the same price, but if you can uber each way for $5, most people would be willing to wait 10 minutes to save $20.

> A car costs about $6000 per year, so about $30 per workday.

And I thought owning cars in America was comparatively cheap.

Meanwhile in Finland, 500-600 eur is enough to cover my tax & insurance. I'm coming close to 2000 eur on repairs and maintenance but I've got somewhat expensive and unusual stuff in this year's bill (like a new bumper & paint job). The rest is all gasoline. About 100 eur per refill, and that's usually enough for a month. Add up, 3800 eur. It's been by and far my most expensive year yet!

OP is dead wrong on those costs. It's extremely cheap to own a car in America.

Latest research shows ride sharing increasing traffic by 180%. Time is money, and even with driverless cars I don't think we'll ever get close to $5.

What we need is more mass transit. Perhaps one day tiny driverless cars that circulate near a mass transit stop can be used to overcome our density deficit. That way they'd stay off heavily traveled corridors, helping improve transit times rather than lengthening them.

An Uber being $5 is generous. I commuted 20 minutes to work everyday, that would be $10 in my area. 20 minutes is a decently low commute time too. Imagine having to commute an hour!

Also, there's a shortage of Uber drivers as is, so the solution to no cars is... more cars?

Driverless cars are very far in the distance, so I don't see the "soon" happening in this title.

I mean, how stupid is it to think paying someone else to drive you around in their car, is cheaper than owning your own car.

I bought a car for 6000 9 years ago. I have probably put about 1000ish into it. That is $2.13 per day. Gas and licensing is another $600 per year so another $1.64.

This is $3.77 per day. Many people have fewer cars than they do family members and all family members depend on them. This may be a house of 3 with 1 car or 4 or 5 with 2 cars.

Uber doesn't at present nor will they any time soon offer a $5 anywhere you want to go fare. When I have looked because of some logistical snafu suggested alternative transportation fares seemed to be in the $10-$15 range one way. This is true even as uber operates at a substantial loss.

Basically your scenario in which uber represents a savings involves choosing a high cost of car ownership for a single owner who only uses their car to commute 3 miles away at a price subsidized by ubers investors.

Back in reality land a household may trivially consume 5 rides daily at $15 per at a daily cost of $75 or $27375 per year.

Cost sensitive buyers could almost certainly save money by buying cheaper cars not by switching to uber.

Uber will never be an economical alternative to car ownership while it requires a drivers butt in a seat.

  A car costs about $6000 per year, so about $30 per workday

IRS all-encompassing mileage rate is $0.545 per mile, so that would mean 55 miles a workday -- far above average.

FYI, The 2019 mileage rate is $0.58/mile

For what it's worth, I work on research that will ultimately define the rules for package delivering drones and Uber air taxis (both of which fall under the umbrella term "Urban Air Mobility"). Even as I work on these things, I have serious doubts about their technical and economic feasibility, but I'm fairly certain that there will be a regulatory framework (in the US anyway) in place within the next decade to allow them if they are otherwise viable.

Incidentally, it would cost you ~$10k-20k to get a sport pilot's license, but that would basically allow you to own and operate a non-autonomous flying car today if it were technically and economically feasible.

It’s as if the entire Midwest doesn’t exist.

Or anywhere 1 hour past San Francisco. Not having a car works great when in SF but once outside you can’t really have a life without it.

Actually 5 minutes if you are talking Marin County. It's pretty tricky to get places in Marin without your own vehicle.

One thing that interests me is how there is such a vastly divergent set of opinions and relationships with vehicles even in just the HN community. When autonomous vehicles were getting a lot of press a few years ago, there were utopian articles predicting the banning of manually driven vehicles by 2025. On the other hand there are a lot of people absolutely convinced that these things are snake oil.

I can see part of the gap being location. When I lived in Philadelphia 20 years ago, I had already “cut the cord” on cars, and simply lived on public transit. I suspect many/most city residents in dense major cities have lived car free for decades.

The current optimism for leaving cars behind may be confined to suburban residents of those same cities. The density and lifestyle in those areas may be suited to these predictions. But there are a lot of parts of the country that conditions like density preclude these things, or at least make them a less valuable proposition. I live in a city of 200k. I know there is Uber here, but I’ve never known any person I know to use it. Cars and insurance are cheap, parking is free, and everything is spread out. The Uber proposition makes much less sense here.

But I also imagine lifestyle can have a big impact on how convenient you see the idea of Uber or the autonomous vehicle subscription fleets that have been discussed in the past. A number of other posters have brought up these things that are more problematic in shared vehicles. But if you don’t repair your leaking roof yourself, you may not see the value in owning a vehicle where you can carry a few sheets of four by eight for home maintenance.

I wonder if there are other factors that influence what side of the divide you fall on. (If my comments seem like I favor the car-owners, I do, but I certainly see how non-car-owner ideal can work for some people, though not me.)

HN community, obviously, skews young, urban, and often "progressive". Quite the demographic that may not (right now!) be interested in car ownership. When I lived in Chicago, it was quite possible to live w/o a car (I still had one, because, hell, it's convenient). If you're an overpaid hipster in the SF bubble, you can absolutely do without a car, riding over little old ladies and baby strollers in a Bird or Lime scooter, and having some poor gig economy Joe Schmoe lug groceries and packages for you. And that it does not actually work for the rest of the world... well, they try not to set foot there, so why would they care.

As for people who point at China, or some European country with lower car ownership, sure, you CAN do without. And 200 years ago people did without electricity and (gasp!) computers, too. But not many people want to go back there.

I mean I'm all for it, in principle, but this is about as out of touch as it gets.

I have a baby. Are these cars I don't own going to have car seats?

Sure, some can, why not. Or you bring your own. When you get to the boaster seat age, it is not a big deal. If city street speeds were limited to 20 mph, would car seats be necessary? You don't need a car seat when boarding a bus.

Bring your own car seat?! And then what, carry it around all day when I get to where I'm going?

Limiting speeds to 20 mph? What? It would take way too long for anyone that doesn't live in the city center to get anywhere!

Might as well get a horse, it might be faster at that point!

We won't need to limit speeds to 20mph, it'll happen naturally. Ride sharing substantially increases traffic--180% is the latest research.

Uber and Lyft are the worse things to happen to traffic since... cars, I guess.

The same people who are owning more and more every day are pushing and trying to convince the rest of people to do not own anything by saying that owning is a bad thing and people should move to subscription models instead of owning anything.

Hello! Person living in 'fly-over country' (that vast stretch between New York and LA) here.

This idea is completely silly. Rural life (where all the food comes from) and the surrounding counties and cities aren't sustainable without cars.

I don't know what drugs the author took to write this headline, but I want the same!

> a quaint hobby, an interesting rarity

Owning a home is a "rarity?" 67.4% (2009) of people own their own home. That's almost a super majority.

Owning a horse, not a home.

(I misread it in the same way at first, because who expects to see "horse" there?)

Spoken like someone who lives in an area where owning a horse is a luxury and doesn't serve an actual purpose.

I want to believe in things like this, but it just doesn't make sense unless you expect complete urbanization and everyone vacating rural areas.

wasn't owning a horse made quaint by the fact that owning a car was far more advantageous? so what is replacing the car? even the authors own anecdote/ethos plug isn't that they cut the landline cord because they could just share a landline phone with their friends, it was because a personal cell phone was a more advanced replacement. maybe i am looking too deeply into an opinion piece from an author who thinks that their ability to predict the rise of cell phones in 1998 makes them an authority prognosticator. well him, zac morris, my fellow arrl, and anyone whose had the pleasure of cruising the citizen's band.

Car-sharing continues to increase (Uber and Lyft are set to go public this year)

I don't see how these two fit the definition of "sharing".

To me they were always just "taxis but with a tax-dodgy flavour".

I do not understand the bitterness on both sides. Yes, people will still find ways to need a car, it just happens like that. Not everyone lives the same life or are in the same geographical location. People still find uses for horses. On the other side, people find ways to not have cars. Just because you need one everyday doesn't mean my single friend Bill who lives downtown NYC needs one too. Everybody has their life, let them live it the way they want to.

* for well-off individuals in a major metropolitan area.

Delusional.

Completely.

> But I am pretty good at this guessing game. In 1998, as one of the first Internet-focused reporters for The Wall Street Journal, I wrote a piece titled “I Cut the Cord” about giving up my land line and going all mobile.

Cringeworthy, I'm afraid. A platform doesn't make you an oracle.

Reminds me of "Is That A Pita In Your Pocket?": https://imgur.com/sHeyip7

Holy fork. He was prescient.

Somebody is having an IPO and hired a PR firm...

This was EXACTLY my thought, but Kara is generally a respected journalist. Does she own shares in either Uber/Lyft?

I’m holding out for the Cowboy Bebop future. Sure the Moon might have exploded and everyone on Earth forced underground, but personal transport will be basically a cheap ship with military-grade weapons and ability to escape the atmosphere and the planet’s gravity under its own power.

Seriously, nothing can beat the convience of owning a car.

Car sharing will grow up more and more as people are getting used to not owning stuff.

> one of the next major secular trends in tech

Secular trends? What the heck does that mean?

A secular trend is roughly any trend that is not either a fad or cyclical.

Basically the claim is that opting out of car-ownership will be a sticky long-term movement, not just something that urban hipsters do for a few years to signal how green they are.

- Ice cream demand going up every summer is a cyclical trend.

- Bell bottoms were a fad.

- Smartphones replacing dumbphones is a secular trend.

Thanks, haven't heard that before

no it will not

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