GM’s Former President Calls for the End of Car Ownership
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I know lots of people who rent or buy-a-share-in apartment blocks. Each apartment block is owned by a company spun off of the construction company that built it.
There are all in a particular european city I am familiar with, but I imagine that system works in other countries too.
If they could instead just pay for the 5% of when they are using it and have it go off and be used by other people the rest of the time, it would probably ending being less expensive overall. There would also be fewer cars around.
Yeah, maybe the GM president once told people to own cars. Maybe that was the right thing at the time. Now circumstances have changed and something else makes more sense. Updating your views to account for new information is not a bad thing.
We buy these cars because we are buying flexibility and time. Even public transportation can take lots of extra time if you aren't in the center of dense service. With my car, I don't have to wait for an Uber, I don't have to plan, I can just go whenever and wherever I want. It also doesn't get exponentially more expensive if I want to go somewhere 1+ hours away. Obviously if you never leave a three block radius, a car would be pretty silly. I'm just trying to say car ownership isn't generally about cost.
Nobody is saying it's going to be illegal to own your own personal car or anything. Sure, if you want to live in the middle of nowhere then you'll probably need your own transportation. For a lot of people it's not going to be as necessary to bother owning your own car when you can call one whenever you need it and it will be there in 5 minutes.
If you can get 90% of the flexibility and time for 10% of the cost that is going to make sense for a lot of people. Not owning a car at all is a much larger difference in savings than owning one that gets 30mpg rather than 20mpg.
Now a lot of the same people that promoted and lobbied for these ideas are trying to sell a "quick fix" in the form of car sharing and other recurring revenue models.
There is no quick fix. The US needs a lot of public infrastructure investment before not owning a car is viable for the majority of people. Uber is not affordable compared to buying a $500 used car from Craigslist if you commute every day and does not solve the problem of navigating big box store "shopping centres" as a pedestrian.
I don't know what city you live in, but where I live the city is pretty difficult to navigate with a car. This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
And besides, the entire point here is that you still have access to a car. You are not facing the problem of navigating a car based infrastructure without a car. The entire idea is that there are cars available on-demand!
I guess we could do nothing and hope that at some point governments figure out to build public transportation in a reasonable time frame for a reasonable amount of money, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that. There is zero reason we can't simultaneously work on more efficiently using the infrastructure we already have.
Non-US governments already have. This isn't incompetence, it's intentional policy.
> This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
Ride sharing has only made this problem worse[1]. Is there any evidence that even more ride sharing will improve the situation? The basic problem is that everyone needs to get into or out of a few central locations at around the same time (typically 9am/5pm). Solving this requires moving people more efficiently (as in more people/m^2 of roadway) than cars, even ride sharing cars, would allow.
[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/report-ride-sharing-inc...
But even if everyone agrees to do it tomorrow, we're talking decades to completely rebuild infrastructure of major cities.
I don't know why this is framed as an either/or choice. Build better public transportation, sure. How about we also use cars more efficiently. Why are you against that?
This statistic is silly. It's like the "you only use 10% of your brain!!1" meme.
I don't disagree with the overall premise and there's definitely cases where it makes sense (especially in cities), but there's a real trade-off being made.
Freedom to choose has value. Convenience has value.
I keep my cleats in the car, so that I can just pick which day I want to play ultimate frisbee on the spur of the moment. I don't have to decide in advance and pack something. That freedom to make up my mind on the spur of the moment is worth something.
I can be at home, and decide I need something from the grocery store, and just go get it. I don't have to order a car and wait for it to arrive. Once I'm done at the store, I don't have to order another car for the trip back. That "it's ready right now" convenience is worth something. (Yeah, I know, in a decent urban world, the grocery store would be within walking distance. I don't live in that ideal urban world.)
The point is a lot of people are going to decide that maybe they can plan a little in advance on when they want to play ultimate frisbee if it helps them avoid the myriad hassles and expenses of owning a car and that's probably going to be good.
I only use my toilets a small fraction of the day as well, would you suggest we crowdsource them for greater efficiency too?
Also this statistic presumes that cars work better with higher utilization and that's muddy at best. Sure, greater utilization is more efficient but it also means the cars go through parts much faster, require more oil, more fuel obviously. And of course the ride share companies aren't paying to maintain the cars that they are running into the ground.
Judging by what is happening right now with EV cars already produced long time ago [1] general outcome and EV cars lifespan will be lower than IC cars due to non-available batteries, there are already people who are seriously disappointed [2] and I think that it is going to be worse because lack of affordable batteries replacement is in best interest of car maker companies.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/aocih1/battery_replac...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/b2etie/more_affordabl...
IC cars do last decades if you care for them. Very few people do.
The other big item is the software in the car becomes slow, dated, and no longer inter-operates properly with the latest phones.
Both of these factors are significantly mitigated with an EV with OTA updates.
Particularly when the manufacturer makes their latest generation hardware field upgradable, you can buy a new MCU and slot it into a late-model car and get all the latest features and performance.
The Model 3 in particular has an esthetic which IMO is particularly timeless and will not feel dated in 10 or even 20 years.
No car is maintenance free. The question is predictability and TCO. If A) maintenance is predictable, B) TCO remains low, and C) performance is consistent, then people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents.
Maybe the physical appearance of the car, but I guarantee the interior and infotainment system will age poorly in 10-20 years, just like any other car. In fact, it might even age worse.
Try using a 5 year old Android tablet and you'll see what I mean.
> people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents
Some people, but there are a lot of people who buy cars for status, and they won't want to be driving a 10 year old car whether it's financially practical or not.
This aspect will not change just because the cars are more reliable.
Outside of California and a couple other states making a car pass emissions until it ages out of the emissions testing program at 15-25yr is not cost prohibitive.
>A tranny rebuild isn't cheap.
Transmission replacement is of similar cost and happens around the same mileage as a battery pack replacement.
>I don't know of any cars junked for lack of new car smell.
His point was that the people that buy new cars typically trade them in and buy another new one for reasons other than it being no longer economically viable to run.
Just think about it: a very high mileage car does maybe 300 000 miles. At an average speed of 30 mph that's only 10 000 hours of running, or 420 days continuously. IC engines in generators, excavators, ships, trains, heck even in aircraft routinely do many many multiples of this before they are scrapped.
For any part on a vehicle, IC or EV, it's possible to make it last fifty thousand hours no problem. But value engineering is a thing, so companies will make stuff cheaper and cheaper until it lasts only for 10k hours, or maybe 2k for a "regular replacement part". There is absolutely no reason they won't do exactly the same value engineering on an EV car as an IC car.
It’s more efficient by fully utilizing each vehicle efficiently for the environment and economically for customers in many ways when debt loads are the biggest issue in recent times...
The ride share services haven't made a dent in the transportation needs of the world.
You know what's necessary? On demand minibusses that go everywhere and are routed to riders along the route to the destination to keep them full. Uber isn't that.
Aside from that, there are three main ways I can think of that a self-driving car could reduce pollution.
a) More people fit in the same car and an intelligent mechanism can pair riders. This exists today in the form of things like Uber Pool. Without a driver you might get one additional passenger in a car.
That's the main mechanism. In the best case it can reduce energy use per passenger by around 20-25% - in a realistic case it would be more like 10% or less.
b) Cars can drive closer together and with more intelligent traffic lights. I think this is incredibly overblown - pedestrians exist and cars are already pretty close together in cities.
I doubt this will make much difference especially given that electric cars use ~zero energy at idle.
c) Over a long time-frame, cities are redesigned such that parking spaces don't exist and so things are closer together.
This is both a multi-decade (possibly even a century) change, and likely to just result in people commuting further - the 1 hour sweet spot isn't going anywhere, all people won't stack in cities unless they're forced, if we're being charitable, say, 50% of people actually prefer that lifestyle.
It also works for taxis.
Basically, the whole thing is nonsense.
What I see as being more likely if self-driving takes off is crackpots sitting at desks in the back of their van, or chilling on a sofa watching movies, and doing multi-hour commutes, offsetting the savings.
I've not even mentioned here the fact that a significant amount of people just like to own their own car and have the funds to do so. Particularly if you're in a rural area, the idea of some SV startup self driving to your ranch is absurd, you're almost certain to either be priced out or just directly geofenced out.
And it would reduce the number of cars on the road, the number of mechanics shops needed to service those cars, the number of insurance companies, most of the infrastructure around licensing, etc. Lots of knock-on effects that would also impact emissions, and a fleet of self-driving cars permit a lot more vertical integration, which reduces TCO.
A fleet of self-driving cars will simply be more cost effective and reduce emissions. Car ownership becoming a luxury is probably inevitable. It will become a collector's hobby, like old sports cars are today.
How? I drive from point A to point B in my car. I'm there for a while, then drive from point B back to point A. Meanwhile, someone else drives from point C to point D, is there for a while, then drives back to point C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->A, C->D, D->C.
Now a self-driving car takes over. It drives me from A to B, goes to C, drives the other person to D, gets me at B, takes me back to A, goes back to D, picks up the other person, and takes them back to C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->C, C->D, D->B, B->A, A->D, D->C.
There is no world in which the second set of trips emits less than the first, given equivalent vehicles. It's simply not possible.
(Note that this is different from the have-everything-delivered scenario. The old way was you drive from A to the store at S, then drive back home to A. Someone else drives from B to S, then back to B. Delivery drives from S to A to B to S, which can be more efficient.)
Firstly, you completely neglect to consider ride sharing, where multiple people are heading in roughly the same direction and so a portion of the trip reduces from 2 legs to 1, ie. the simplest case from your examples would be A->C->B->D(wait)->B->C->A. The more people that use the service, the more likely this is to happen, and the more emissions are reduced. It's the exact same aggregation argument supporting the use of transit.
Secondly, you're only focusing on specific local effects rather than systemic effects. The number of cars on the road would be dramatically lower [1], so we're manufacturing, maintaining, licensing and insuring fewer cars, all of which counts towards reducing emissions.
Then the marginal reduction in convenience means some people would change their behaviour, ie. travel less and/or plan their travel better so they get more done in a single trip.
Frankly, it seems clear that there is no world in which people owning their cars would be superior or even equivalent to a fleet of self-driving cars when it comes to environmental impact, traffic or efficiency.
Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.
If you want to solve environmental problems from cars invest in public transit. The biggest problem in modern cities is neighborhood designs that make public transit too slow. (you need to have a short walk to the stop, and then the vehicle not make many twists and turns along the way to where you want to be). Density is useful for transit, but suburbs already have the minimum density required, they lack the ability for transit to be fast though.
They will be cheaper. No licensing, insurance, maintenance, fuel, but still almost all of the convenience of a personal vehicle requiring only a short wait time.
> Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.
That's not how it would work. If parking becomes necessary because network capacity is too high and utilization too low, the car would park in its immediate vicinity. We have lots of parking everywhere to accommodate far more cars than would be needed in a world with mostly self-driving cars.
The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.
Sure we have parking everywhere. However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway, so it may as well be your personal car so you can leave the golf clubs in the trunk.
Do you need a license to hail an Uber? If that Uber became self-driving, why would you need a license? Certainly Uber cars would need to have some kind of inspection, but that's just an extension of whatever inspections exist for road-worthiness.
> Maintenance is a requirement - the tires will wear out if nothing else. Fuel is still a factor - it might not be liquid, but you need some sort of energy.
These are no longer costs born by the driver/rider, but are now aggregated by the car service. Aggregating yields considerable cost savings.
> The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.
A bus wait takes a minimum of 15 minutes. An Uber arrives within 5 minutes, and with self-driving cars and capacity planning, this can be brought down to some arbitrarily small number if needed. A bus also requires walking to and from stops, which also adds at least 5-10 minutes for most people. That's a big difference, not to mention these are multiplied considerably in rural areas or areas with considerable urban sprawl. And the first few minutes of waiting for an Uber I'm putting on my shoes, jacket, etc.
Walking down to your car takes at least 3 minutes in a condo. If you own a home with driveway, it will still take you 1 minute to walk to your car and start it up (and a few minutes to warm it up if it's winter).
So the advantage of ownership amounts to about 1 minute in winter climates, and maybe 2-3 minutes in warm climates. That's perfectly reasonable tradeoff considering the expected cost savings.
> However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway
I don't know what this means. My point was that we don't need to build huge parking lots outside of the city for idle self-driving cars to which they would drive to/back when utilization is low, we already have a glut of parking available for a transition to a self-driving world, and all localized within our cities. A self-driving car service would just use all the parking scattered everywhere throughout the city and so have cars available nearby, no matter where you are.
I already aggregate the cost of maintenance across all my personal driving: there is no cost savings. (if you do your own work it is more expnesive)
A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max (q.5 minutes on average). If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership. Walking counts as exercise, like it or not your doctor wants you to get more.
Rural areas yes - but rural areas have a lot longer to wait for a shared car.
No, aggregated across all drivers, not just aggregated across your driving. As in, 1 million drivers insuring, licensing and maintaining 1 million cars costs far more than 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars whose insurance, licensing and maintenance is aggregated by a riding sharing service like Uber, and those savings will show up in your final bill, ie. total cost of ownership of your own car will exceed using ride sharing services with self-driving cars for virtually all people.
> A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max
It can be as little as 0 minutes if you get there at the perfect time. That's irrelevant though. Worst case and average case wait times are what's important.
> If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership.
No, it's the lack of sufficient incentive and benefits to use transit. America is not Europe.
The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.
> The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.
Sure, but the increased convenience of not needing a shared meetup/dropoff of transit is considerable. The biggest cause of traffic into and out of a city is the 1 driver commute from the outlying regions. If car ownership were more expensive than ride sharing, most of these people would use ride sharing because it has the convenience benefits of car ownership with the efficiency benefits of transit. The ride sharing equilibrium in this model would be upwards of 70% for rush hour, at least.
Non-rush hour times would have fewer cars on the road because the cars would park themselves when utilization falls. This is more efficient and more convenient than transit.
Why? One argument that is cooking right now: "you don't know how to properly manage these things to support sustainable progress of humanity (and because you are broke)"
You cant have inverted wealth pyramid growing indefinitely, It will eventually crash, especially when instead of creating wealth you erode the bottom.
I used to be really excited about tech prolonging life, but now i think it will be artificially made prohibitively expensive so the rich cast can hold on to their power even more.
Currently the power was lost when next generation was bad at managing their parent's empires... well I think we are quickly approaching techno dystopia.
But its trivial to see the irony here. This salesman is too shallow to actually walk the walk, and is gonna get laughed at a lot for it.
I no longer own a car. I gave my last car to my granddaughter last spring. I do “cheat” a bit because I can use my wife’s car, but I find it liberating to not have a car. Living in a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona (Sedona), I can walk to our beautiful library in 25 minutes, to our local food bank where I volunteer one day a week in 15 minutes, and to our local movie theater and a grocery store in 10 minutes.
Except for writing I am now retired, so I can afford “wasting time” by walking.
My generation has done a horrible job living in an environmentally sustainable way. I want to take a 110 day around the world cruise, and roughly not buying a new car might offset the environmental damage of taking that cruise. Anyway, that is how I see it.
They don't even know when they're going to launch after missing their public deadline (and certainly several internal deadlines). This is just more self-driving hype in a space where companies need to constantly raise money. Cruise has already raised billions outside of GM and will need to continue to do so since they have no revenue.
EDIT: In case it was unclear, GM's Former President is now the CEO of Cruise.
Large scale carbon emitters like the u.s. can have a global effect. It global temps continue to rise it will have major negative effects on smaller countries. It has already started with my home country.
You don't pay a tax that goes towards mitigating that... unfortunately. I am not saying taking away cars but we should be more responsible where it comes to owning or making the decision of owning one.
I've known folks who limp along old cars for years, dealing with potentially dangerous issues with the transmission or suspension. And don't get me started on people who don't keep tires with sufficient tread.
But all these terrible cars are cheap to continue driving in a just-barely-works state. Folks are able to get to their jobs working daycare or fast food in a beat-up 15 year-old car because many places in the US don't require safety inspections, or if they do, only when the car is transferred to a new owner.
If individual car ownership ends, and all the cars are instead owned by large drive-share corporations, that's obviously going to be heavily regulated, cars will all be maintained on a best-practice schedule, etc. Similar to how rental car companies or Uber/Lyft today only use newer, reasonably-maintained vehicles.
If that becomes the reality for all cars in America, we might see a market sort of like Japan. They have a rigorous periodic safety inspection called Shaken, so cars in Japan mostly tend to be newer. Once cars get older and require more work, they're often seen as fairly worthless in Japan and exported to poorer countries with more lax vehicle requirements.
I personally like the Japanese system - it seems to make sense that cars on the road should meet a rigorous level of roadworthiness. But that's so different from the current reality in the US that I'm not sure society would go along with the higher costs that would come with these well-maintained shared vehicles.
No bias there!
I'm sure someday it will be a thing but the infrastructure is not there. Or not here in my neck of the woods yet. We only have two maybe three EV charging stations in my entire province. Not that autonomous vehicles are all EV but I'm sure that's the direction they industry is heading and wants.
But to realistic, on this -13C day with icy roads I am not looking forward to an autonomous vehicles. I can't see an autonomous vehicle driving me on slippery narrow winding country roads. Half the time maps don't have the roads correctly mapped here, the road lines are covered in snow, no paved shoulder, roads are infrequently plowed and salted.
Autonomous raises the prospect of cars driving around with no people in them, doing even more environmental damage and causing even more traffic jams.
They don't have an easy means to rid themselves of an excessive number of dealerships. However a sharing system can effectively do that; fwiw I have little if any issues with the dealership model and i drive a TM3!
it also insulates them from having to make appealing vehicles, they have already proven they cannot do so in the sedan market and have effectively abandoned it.
snark aside, they are already experienced in selling to rental fleets and have put together packages for cars that suit that market very well while not appealing to regular buyers
I have been very impressed with the steady incremental real-world improvements to AutoPilot over the last 13 months since I got my Model 3. They have added up to a dramatically more adept system which has become an extremely competent highway driver handling lane changes, merges, being cut off, handling poor visibility, lane closures / traffic cones, even things like scooting slightly over to one side of the lane to give a bit more room when passing a large truck.
One example of behavior which has gotten better over the last couple months is during merges where the right lane would appear to widen, prior versions would steer right to try to re-center and then have to steer left to get back in lane, where now the car understands how to keep its path in these situations, even if there isn’t a square-dashed-line drawn to indicate the right side of the right lane continuing.
I think the majority of the miles driven on my Tesla have been driven with AutoPilot. (Actually that would be a really cool feature if the car could show that number.) It’s become indispensable to me, and it keeps getting marginally better every month.
I’m not saying that it is full autonomy, or even that we will get there on the next couple years. But the cumulative progress over the last 12 months has been incredible, and if it continues anywhere near this rate of advancement over the next 24-36 months, I think AutoPilot will be a truly remarkable achievement — as in, approaching a watershed human achievement akin to spaceflight.
>I think AutoPilot will be a truly remarkable achievement — as in, approaching a watershed human achievement akin to spaceflight.
Just want to point out the irony in this statement. Ok sure, fully autonomous self driving may be a great technological achievement, but it will be an achievement that benefits rent-seeking corporations rather than humanity at large. Sure, the benefits of such a service could allow car-free living at a price cheaper than leasing/owning a car, but this is a benefit that will be reaped by those with means (middle class) while the poor will still be riding the bus or walking. It would also make investment in public transportation even less likely, which would actually result in a net benefit for all.
Full autonomous driving will be a significantly greater accomplishment for humanity than you’re giving it credit for.
I’m not patient either.
Moreover, speech recognition isn't a product you can't launch in a faulty state. You can sell a bad product, make a profit, and iterate without any consequence.
It's not the same with self driving cars, which won't be profitable till you get rid of the driver entirely. And you can't launch a ok product and iterate. It has to be almost perfect when it comes to safety.
Barring geofencing or legislative changes, you have to get it in a perfect state before you roll it out.
When the VC money dies down, and when such big companies are no longer optimistic at having a viable self driving car, the research is going to slow down drastically, till a new wave of funding comes along from some other boom to resuscitate the research.
No, it merely has to be as good as humans, though it should be mildly better. The massive economic and feature advantages it will bring to the table mean that regular people will paper over problems real quick, just as with, well, current cars. In fact if anything I wonder if a higher rate of fatalities and accidents would actually be psychologically better than "almost perfect", because in the modern environment things that are super rare and low risk tend to get inordinate media attention and political response vs things that happen with a certain frequency and thus people become habituated to. I mean, again cars themselves are the big example of that. In America alone, estimates are around 40,000 died last year, which itself was actually around a 1% drop from the previous few years. Which means hundreds of fewer deaths. But that didn't register remotely like a handful of high profile super unlikely dramatic deaths would.
But the bonuses are the main things vs any negatives, because humans are good at motivated reasoning to deal with risk when it's something they want. And a reliable included always available personal chauffeur that means things like car access for kids without disruption of parents' schedules, continued car access for the elderly (note, one of the most powerful and reliable voting segments of the electorate), elimination of issues due to drinking/tiredness/phone usage, just plain letting people do other productive things or flat out sleep on trips, etc etc etc., is a powerful set of incentives to quickly move past someone else's "bad luck".
I think Tesla is doing just this. They are putting self driving features on their cars, putting the onus on the driver to supervise, and using the experiment to gather data. I don't expect their current hardware to ever be able to deliver full autonomous driving, but it will likely provide a useful stepping stone.
Yes you can, tesla and comma.ai doing it right now.
I think we should just "move fast and break things"... make all cars self-drivable via speech recognition. I mean that would would serve to limit car ownership... to those with a death wish.
I live in NY. About 40 miles as the crow flies from NYC. Public transportation is unusable in my town... buses run about once an hour, give or take an hour on weekdays--forget about Sundays. How would you like trying get a sick child to a doctors appointment then going to a pharmacy? Need milk before a snow storm.. good luck. My point is the Vast majority of the USA is not geographically located in metropolitan areas.
As a side: Metro North which I used when I worked in queens... is fricken expensive as hell and slow as molasses.
Oh and one more thing; there are no sidewalks nor lighting on any of the residential streets in our town. When you walk here after dark you better damn well have a flashlight in your hand (most cellphones don't throw enough light far enough), futhermore if its rainy and foggy like it often is in summer or late autumn--dude it's no joke. My main concern when I drive here after dark is to Not hit a pedestrian, they are few and far between but still. My point is; we need car ownership here, will it always be this way? IDK, but that is the current reality and you're not going to change that anytime in the near future without years long infrastructure projects.
I regularly yell at Google when I ask it to play me a song, oftentimes even when I spell out words letter by letter, painstakingly slowly, and it still fails me.
Speech recognition doesn't work all that well for me.
Anyway, I think nuclear fusion is a much better comparison. There is an inflection point where it just works, and until you reach that it's not really useful to anybody except as a research problem. And based on what I hear from my peers who work on self-driving cars (including at Cruise), it's still decades away. Most of them already quit because they just stopped believing it was ever going to happen.
Well, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.