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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Responding to my own comment here...

Anybody got both Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk's numbers in their speed dial?

What if a "disrupt the cab industry" company got together with a "low moving part, high reliability electric car maker" to do an end-run around the expected auto industry opposition...

A fleet of driverless electric taxis, all routed by smartphone apps and behavioural prediction...

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Then, when everybody is impressed with how well they work, you start selling fleets of them to Apple/Google/Oracle/SouthBayTechFirmDeJour - every evening a train of autonomous cars starts arriving and emptying out your campus 4 people per car heading for nearby/on-the-way destinations, all of a sudden those 20 hectares of parking lot can become cube farms or data centres...

During the middle of the day and all night, you lease the capacity to FedEx or UPS...

As long as we're hitting this one out the ballpark we can imagine all the online services getting in on the action: like the OKCupid speed date commute, the Yelp surprise me whats for dinner restaurant ride, or the Groupon deal of the day carpool.

Limited range cars with long recharge times would be a poor operating fit for economics that favor high utilization. There'd be too much downtime during peak times of day.

Maybe it could be coupled with swappable battery pack stations that the autotaxis could visit to get a freshly charged pack. A geographically focused taxi company could have the financial resources to invest in the battery depot, which would also solve the standardization problem.

Perhaps a revenue opportunity for cash-strapped cities?

If we stop owning cars and the communal ones we use drive themselves home, we'll stop putting money in parking meters.

Replace the parking meters with charging stations...

Sorry, that's been solved. There are efforts to implementing this exact network of fuelling stations (battery swapping) for electric cars, and Better Place is a shining example from Isreal:

http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=10007...

On the other hand, if you find yourself running low on juice, either because you're on a long trip or because you didn't plan ahead, it's not a problem. You just swap cars like the Pony Express swapped horses.

Lower utilization is balanced by lower energy costs than gasoline (but you're right, swappable batteries would help too).

Bright Automotive is doing fleet vehicles, not a huge step away.

http://www.brightautomotive.com/

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