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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

The wear on a car costs about as much as paying someone to drive it. The costs can only go so low, and the cost of personal ownership is still going to be higher than a fleet because the car sits around more. And if they're so cheap I'd still expect to see instant rental/taxi fleets.

As for people buying more cars, so many people already have cars that I don't imagine that having a huge effect.

So overall I disagree with your conclusions.

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The wear on electric cars is significantly cheaper. No pistons, no oil, no gears, no transmission, no exaust system, no series of gaskets for the coolant to flow through the engine block. In fact, electric motors only have metal to metal contact at bearings, the actual forced produced is without metal to metal contact.

Fleet prices for electric cars today are already significantly cheaper. In the future, probably more so.

This doesn't invalidate your point, but the motors in electric cars are also liquid cooled just like ICEs. The system is a bit simpler since you're cooling a motor and not an engine, but ultimately it's a water cooling system and needs gaskets etc.

Yeah, people too often say things like "there's no gaskets" or "there's no gears or oil". There are gaskets, there are usually gears, there is usually a lubricant oil in the gearbox. But the temps and pressures on the cooling systems are much lower, the gearboxes are fixed gear ratios, and there's no waste carbons in the oil dirtying it. So the service intervals of all of these are much longer than any regular ICE vehicle.

Most electric cars still have a gear box with gear oil lubricating it. They're usually fixed gear ratios so the wear and tear is much lower (not sliding gears around but on cars it's not normally the motors directly connected to the wheels.

> so many people already have cars that I don't imagine that having a huge effect.

Instead of one car per adult, it'll be one car per person once the kids get to primary school age in suburban families.

There are a lot of elderly and disabled people would own cars if they were self-driving and a bit cheaper than they are now. Many people currently using public transport might switch, too. That group might use shared cars, but the others are unlikely to.

The effect might be bigger than one would think.

Edit: the effect on traffic volume and congestion will be bigger. Freed from the burden of driving, commuters will be able to live further away from their jobs. Empty cars will be a significant fraction of vehicles on the road.

> Instead of one car per adult, it'll be one car per person once the kids get to primary school age in suburban families.

I was actually thinking that it would reduce car ownership. If I could commute and then send the car to home so that my wife could commute to her workplace, I definitely would! It would require syncing on who uses the car when, but at a more granular level compared to now ("I'm taking the car today" vs "I'm taking the car between 8-9am").

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