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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't driverless cars be purchased by individuals?

I want one and I have money - when they're available, why wouldn't I be able to buy one?

Are you suggesting that I won't want to? I'm skeptical - the convenience of being able to use something whenever I want trumps cost. Or are you suggesting that I won't be able to?

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Consider all the downsides of owning a car:

1. You have to change oil, tires and make all the other repairs.

2. You have to pay for insurance.

3. You have to pay for parking. In SF parking alone can cost you $100/month (I mean if you don't own a house with a garage (which will take you back $1 million); I don't think most rental apartments come with parking spaces so you either have to stress out about finding a parking space for the night close to where you live or pay for parking spot).

4. Parking while driving in the city. If you need to drive somewhere and stay there, you have to find parking, which, in SF, is not easy to do. A rented car just drives you to where you need to go and then goes of to pick up the next customer. When you want to get back, you summon another car.

5. What if you want go skiing for the weekend and need snow tires? Would you rather put snow tires yourself or summon a car that has them?

I'm in SF and I already use my car so rarely that its battery died on me. I do ZipCar but it doesn't cover a lot of scenarios that, while not frequent, do happen and the requirement that you need to return the car to where you took it from makes it non starter for short trips within city.

If there was a service where I could just summon a car anytime, it would be cheap enough to work as a taxi replacement but also for longer trips, I wouldn't buy a car.

Cars are much more than solutions to a transport problem. They are status symbols, personal identities, an extension of ones castle. It will take a very long time, perhaps never, for most people to adopt a taxi/public transport route.

I'd very happily own a driverless car. Even better will be when I take it out of driverless mode in the rural roads. It would be able to take itself to get its oil/ires serviced,to be recharged and to park somewhere cheap and out of the way. Bring it on.

Cars are status symbols in large part because they are advertised as such. If people buy fewer cars you will see a lot less car advertising which will directly reduce the status symbol effect.

See: Pocket watches > wrist watches > cell phones.

I believe the idea is that with time, it won't make fiscal sense. The first wave of these will be bought in small part by early adopting owners but more likely by small-time transit / freight companies looking to save a buck.

Once it's a proven small-scale model, larger transit and freight systems will start using them; I'd expect ZipCar and Uber and similar services to jump on it. At this time, more and more people would be buying their own driverless car.

Now picture 20 years down the road. You're a young person who can't afford a car. Do you get a job to pay to buy a car, or do you use a service like ZipCar? Fast forward 5 years, you've got a job and you could afford a car. Do you buy one to give you "added convenience"? That's what ZipCar will have to beat. If they can get a car to you by the time you're outside your house, they are actually beating personally owned vehicles, and the closer to that they get, the less likely it is people will purchase vehicles.

It's mostly because no-one will pay $5k extra for a car that they perceive to be a worse driver than themselves, but a better driver than a taxi driver.

Do people seriously consider themselves better drivers than the people who actually drive cars for a living?

There have been many studies that show that the large majority of people consider themselves "better than average" drivers. It is called Lake Woebegone effect or Illusory superiority - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_woebegone_effect

Yes, but professional drivers are not "average".

Certainly they do, but of course, they would think so. Still, I'd argue that this is not even that crazy. At least in San Francisco, I vastly prefer to ride with just about any colleague I've ever met than the local taxi drivers, based on these criteria:

- comfort while riding (lack of abrupt motions requiring me to brace myself)

- courtesy to other drivers and pedestrians

- actual number of traffic accidents (colleagues: 0, taxis: 2, although fortunately both accidents were mainly property damage rather than serious injury... but still)

Planes are extra expensive because only coorporations buy them. There isn't infrastructure to sell them to individuals. That raises the price and difficulty of buying them, and also makes it a more sound political strategy to make stricter laws requiring airplane safety, which further makes it inconvenient to operate your own plane.

Some very rich people still own private jets, but it's rarer than it would be if more people were rich.

I want one and I have money - when they're available, why wouldn't I be able to buy one?

I think you would, but the conventional wisdom around owning your own car would along the lines of the current CW surrounding owning your own aircraft: it would be something for wealthy enthusiasts, not the general public.

He's suggesting that when you can open an app on your phone and (for the vast majority of the population in non rural areas) get a car to your door within 5 minutes, there won't be a connivence gap.

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