Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

Cute concept car. If your only user need for a car is “I need to commute 5-30 minutes a day in normal urban traffic” then it will tick the box. I’m genuinely curious how many people in the world are in that category.

View on HN

I'd say the extreme vast majority of urban dwellers

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Maybe suburban, but Germany from what I've seen is still pretty car-centric.

Oh for sure, but most of them don't need a 5 seats 2+ tonnes car that can do 700km on a single charge because most of them do <20km per day and travel alone

I'm guessing Germany, like most countries, is pretty bimodal when it comes to the driving distribution. The people I know in downtown Berlin or Hamburg average around 0 km a day. The people I know in small rural towns way off in the eastern parts of Germany easily drive 100+ km many days a week.

My initial impression of Berlin was similar. If I lived there, no shot I'd drive, but it still seems somewhat car-centric with various historical grand boulevards and so on. Maybe the west side is worse or my opinion os coloured a bit by Amsterdam dominating.

For such short distanec it's better to use public transport without wasting money on single purpose car which can't be used as family car to travel anywhere.

I won't argue against that, the problem is that most of them already use a car, a smaller EV would definitely be much better than a big ICE vehicle or a big EV

> I won't argue against that, the problem is that most of them already use a car, a smaller EV would definitely be much better than a big ICE vehicle or a big EV

Sure, they already have a car, but most people won't replace their car with something that doesn't already fit the use-cases their current car fits.

IOW, I don't think this is a replacement for current cars, it's a replacement for electric scooters, ebikes, motorcycles, current subcompact (citroen ami, for example) and public transport use.

A lot of people know their cities will never provide proper public transport tho. It's currently only possible in the USA if we become an authoritarian country because there is no public will for it.

It ticks a lot of different boxes, because it's not a car. If we banned cars from cities and instead used LUVs, we could have more of them in the roads moving faster, because there's less risk and more space. More trips could happen faster for more use cases.

Imagine multiple levels of roads that don't have to support as much weight. Parking structures that can handle 20x the number of vehicles. Public rentals like scooters so you don't have to park one at home but one is always nearby. The convenience of going shopping in a personal bubble and utility to haul back tons of stuff.

It will take anther 50-100 years to end the domination of cars, but they will end, because LUVs will just be so much cheaper and more convenient, once we tailor cities to them rather than to cars the way they are now.

Most people? At least looking at the statistics for Norway, almost exactly 63% of daily trips with a car in 2020 was below 10 kms.

I'd argue one doesn't need a car at all for this, though..

In that case it seems Norway has A) extremely lazy people and/or B) very bad public transport, if you need car to travel less than 10km.

Or very bad weather.

One would think if EV can operate in bad weather, there is no reason why public transport should not handle it for such short distance as well.

Do you think the numbers are better for the US for instance, where it often is impossible to walk between two different stores?

I wouldn't ascribe it to laziness. While I really want to remove many cars because all the negative effects they have on society (pollution, noise, dangers, area use etc), it's a structural problem. It's too easy too drive compared to the alternatives for many people.

For me, I bike to work every day, no matter the season.

Norway is in Europe so I judge it by European public transport standards. Honestly 10km is easily doable even on electric bike, that's really extremely short distance (unless when snowy/wet/mountanious).

> It's too easy too drive compared to the alternatives for many people.

Which is just more words for "laziness".

> If your only user need for a car is “I need to commute 5-30 minutes a day in normal urban traffic” then it will tick the box. I’m genuinely curious how many people in the world are in that category.

Very many - every motorcycle commuter falls in that category, after all.

You know if you stop requiring everyone to travel 50km by monster truck to do anything, then you don't have to spend an hour driving past parking lots and highway interchanges to do anything, right?

Many families have two cars. Maybe one car is smaller and the other car is for long road trips.

Also, shouldn't those people just take a bicycle instead?

When it's 105 outside and 70% humdity bicycles are not fun, especially if there is no office shower.

Most people I've met who own EVs are in that category.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com