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Comment by codelion | Hacker News Reader

The post is misleading, people do not have multiple cars because they cannot drive, it is because they have to use it for multiple things at the same time. Morning going to work, dropping kids etc. will happen all at the same time. Peak car usage will not be affected by self driving cars.

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That is true, but the times can be shifted if the car can drive back after dropping you off.

For example: 1. Drive to work 2. Drive home 3. Drive to school 4. Drive home 5. Drive to store ...

Many parents already drop their kids off @ school and thus are adjusting their schedules appropriately.

You're going to increase your fuel bills dramatically driving ack and forth like that.

So your hourly car rental rates will go up during peak usage until it balances out peak usage. While car rental companies may decline to change their rates on a minute-by-minute basis the only reason is to prevent customer confusion, nothing technical will stop it. Supply, demand, and price information can optimize a system like nothing else.

And even during peak times, car rentals will be augmented by a suddenly-reinvigorate public transport system; your car may take you to a bus, to be picked up by a car on the other end.

The only missing bit of tech is the actual self-driving car. Everything else is simple and obvious extrapolation from brain-dead simple Economics 101 and already-existing network technology. Modern car usage will be seen as only an incremental improvement on horse-drawn buggies, with the real revolution happening much later.

Actually, I think such a system would kill public transportation because it would become cheaper to use the cars than public transport.

I don't know the exact breakdown but my guess is that salaries of drivers are much more expensive than buses and gas, especially given those are often unionized jobs with very costly benefits (pension etc.).

If we have self driving cars why wouldn't we have self driving public transport?

That's a good point. I still think public transportation would be replaced.

I believe the main reason local government provides public transportation is because to achieve low prices it needs to be subsidized. No private enterprise is interested in competing in a market where you can't make profit.

At the same time, you don't see local government e.g. opening grocery shops: this need is well filled by private enterprise.

The car rental business would develop despite public transportation because it covers a much bigger needs. However, when it reaches scale and the low price that comes with it, it might make public transportation no longer needed as it'll also cover that use case.

Even if it's slightly more expensive, would you rather pay $2, wait 15mins, not get exactly where you want to go and hope no one will punch you in your face and steal your iphone (true story!) or pay $5, wait 5min and get exactly where you wanted to go?

If enough people start doing that, at some point the fixed cost of running public transportation will be too high to justify low usage by public.

Not to mention I do expect for profit enterprise to adopt driverless cars much faster than government agency, hence giving them a cost advantage for quite a few years.

I don't think peak usage is equal to the total number of owned cars; that would imply that there's some time of day at which every single car is simultaneously being driven, which is pretty hard to believe.

It'd require inter-household car sharing on a significant scale to take advantage of that, though.

People have multiple cars because they want to live among people who can afford multiple cars, and more specifically avoid the urban poor who cannot afford them. American car dependent suburbia exists in large part due to white flight. I imagine cheap driver-less cars would screw up this system.

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