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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

As others have noted, autonomous vehicles may actually lead to less car use. Currently, many people must own cars for certain use cases. Because of this, for any given trip the decision to take car vs. other means is based on the marginal cost of car usage. In contrast, if people no longer need to own cars because of autonomous taxis, the decision of car vs. other reflects the ammortized cost of car use, which will be far higher than the marginal cost. Put another way, there are plenty of trips being taken by car now simply because people have a car for other reasons, but if they didn't own a car they'd far sooner take another option vs. renting/Uber/Waymo.

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People will very likely also be willing to spend much more time in cars if they don't have to actively drive. E.g. you have a 2 hour commute but you can play on your steam deck the whole time, or you can travel by sleeping in your car while it drives 8 hours.

To the extent that self driving taxi services are cheaper than human driven taxi services, they will also increase use of taxi services.

There's no reason to assume that on the balance people will end up driving less as a result of a technology that makes driving significantly more convenient simply because it might make taxi services somewhat cheaper and therefore potentially might make it easier to not own a car and encourage people to use other modes of transportation for some trips.

Well, sleeping is generally done when demand for cars is extremely low. And a lot of people can’t sleep in cars even when they are a passenger. It’s hard to imagine that becoming common enough, even at very low prices, to add to the number of cars on the road.

While I’d certainly prefer to watch Netflix than actively drive, I’ve still got stuff I need/want to do that I can’t in a car even as a passenger. And it’s just not comfortable for long periods of time. A lot of people get motion sickness staring at a screen in a moving car. Etc.

A lot of people own pickups just because they occasionally want to tow something or move something large. A lot of people own second cars for occasional use. These might become rentals instead when it can affordably just show up at my door in a half hour.

There’s no way to tell how this plays out. There will be some amount of induced demand, there will be some amount of reduction in use. One never knows which will be bigger.

What I do know is traffic deaths kill over 40,000 Americans a year, and driverless cars could potentially get that to 0 or near it, whereas human drivers cannot. I do know we can electrify cars and power them all with renewable energy, not immediately of course, and remove many of the environmental concerns. We can enhance mobility for the elderly and children and mentally disabled who can’t drive.

There’s a strange amount of anti-car propaganda that has gotten people worried about this, but I look forward to a driverless future in which cars are cheap, clean, safe, and available to all.

> There’s a strange amount of anti-car propaganda that has gotten people worried about this, but I look forward to a driverless future in which cars are cheap, clean, safe, and available to all.

It’s not propaganda but jumbled concerns which are often poorly expressed. I think the strongest arguments are:

1. Self-driving cars don’t change pollution - even EVs are better for local air quality but still cause massive carbon emissions and unchanged or worse tire particulates, etc. – and may even make it worse locally with the extra mileage from taxi fleets.

2. Self-driving cars only lightly improve congestion, and then only to the extent that they can coordinate and you can ban non-AI drivers from certain chokepoints at certain times. The form factor unavoidably needs far more space per passenger than anything else.

3. Self-driving cars don’t really help with affordability – even if the current prices come closer to parity, that’s a financial stress for many people (e.g. in the region where I live, the average family spends as much on vehicles as they do food).

4. Self-driving safety needs a different relationship with the manufacturer. There are many areas where they can be safer but failures can also be correlated so we really need companies to share liability and have rigorous safety oversight.

As a pedestrian, I’m fairly bullish on the concept given how dangerous the average driver is now compared to 20 years ago but I worry that a lot of politicians are going to ignore the other issues because those require hard choices whereas it’s so compatible with American culture to say you can solve major problems by making an expensive purchase. These shouldn’t be opposing issues, of course, and I’d really like to combine them because autonomous vehicles should soon, if not already, be much better about following speed limits, staying out of bus lanes, etc. Making advanced automatic braking a requirement to enter a city could save thousands of lives every year.

The EV pollution component of this is 100% propaganda spread by legacy auto makers and fossil fuel companies and is blatantly false. They are substantially better for the environment and the delta is growing too. Even in an area where energy is generated by fossil fuels, EVs emit significantly less CO2 per mile driven. Like 2-4x depending on a wide range of factors. And most new power generation being built in the US is now renewables and if anything, we lag much of the world. It's over 80%. (Luckily it's easy to tell the near future in this regard because utility info is all public and planned out years in advance due to permitting, purchasing, etc. so there are functionally no currently unplanned power plants being built in 2024 or even until 2027 or 2028 or so.) This is because it's just cheaper now, and the economics of wind/solar get better every year as generation costs fall and fossil fuel prices rise. Technology usually gets cheaper, fossil fuels usually get more expensive, and both of these seem to be true in this case. You are correct about particulates, but it's basically insigificant compared to carbon emissions, and probably even offset by lack of motor oil or various other fluids that spill and need produced and then to be disposed of, time the car has to drive in for service, etc. Any sane person would happily trade a 50-80% reduction in lifecycle CO2 emissions per car for a 25% increase in tire particulate matter in the environment. It's only propaganda that makes people mention this, even if it's true, because it's just a non-factor.

I had half a mind to write a long treatise on why I think we'll only see significant EV adoption if/when cars become driverless, but I'll save it and just go with this. Someone I know was killed last week in a hit and run. She got in a minor car accident, got out to check on it, and a third driver hit her and took off.

When it comes to affordability, economists generally set the economic value of an average American life at ~$10 million, and 40,000 people die from traffic deaths every year. Even if we just look at the numbers, Americans buy about 3 million cars a year. So 40,000 * $10 million divided by 3 million is a savings of over $133k per car, which is far in excess of the average car's lifetime cost. Even a 50% reduction in deaths, which for all I know currently existing driverless cars could achieve, would be the same as making all cars free in terms of average cost.

And even if driverless cars are a total push in every other respect (and I think they'll be much better) 40,000 families a year (and I assume globally, at least 5x that) not losing a wife and mother that way is more than worth whatever we have to do to make it happen.

Stay safe.

> The EV pollution component of this is 100% propaganda spread by legacy auto makers and fossil fuel companies and is blatantly false. They are substantially better for the environment and the delta is growing too. Even in an area where energy is generated by fossil fuels, EVs emit significantly less CO2 per mile driven.

That’s not the argument being made. Everyone knows they pollute less per mile – but unfortunately the manufacturing is roughly half of the lifetime pollution from a vehicle.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/27/ucs-study-shows-lifetim...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

This matters especially because consumers have been getting heavily marketed into getting massive trucks and SUVs, where the sheer size of the vehicle means the lifetime emissions are greater than a small ICE because the lack of tailpipe emissions can’t make up for that even if it’s powered entirely off of renewables.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be electrifying the vehicle fleet quickly but it’s buying time on the trip to zero emissions, not a solution. Buses and e-bikes get us much further because they don’t suffer from emissions the inherent inefficiency of automobiles.

>Buses and e-bikes get us much further because they don’t suffer from emissions the inherent inefficiency of automobiles.

It's a free country: people are free to choose to use autonomous cars over ebikes and buses and why wouldn't they? The emissions profile of a personal electric car being unaffordable[0] doesn't pass the sniff test.

[0]Fair economic taxation of externalities - considering current status quo.

Those comments always remind me how insular this community is. Go to Cleveland, or Phoenix, or Houston, or literally any city that isn’t in the top five in density, and try getting around by bus or bike and tell me how you like your life.

I don’t particularly love cars or anything, and would be really happy to not have to have one, but there’s no way I’m going to try to rely on buses or bikes. I value my time, too much for buses and my life, and not being either frozen or covered in sweat too much for any sort of bike.

A car gets you from point A to point B quickly, reliably, comfortably, and with cargo. Nothing else does that, and we are willing to spend a significant portion of our income for it.

We’re only talking about pollution here - the problem is that multi-ton heavy machinery has a much bigger footprint than any other common option for moving a person around. It’s not a “free country” debate, just unavoidable physics: using 4-6K lbs of machine to move 200lbs of person is going to require a lot more energy than a 20lbs bicycle or having that person share a bus with 50 other people.

I think taxing carbon would be a great way to encourage people to reconsider how they travel, and would expect many people to pick things like those small EVs for urban usage if that became common.

Both of those links say EVs still have substantially low carbon emissions.

Studies are all over the map but the ones that put it anywhere near 50% are all from China.

Speaking for myself, I would absolutely "drive" more miles if my car were autonomous. I'd take the hour+ trip into the city far more if I didn't have to drive or go on the two hour+ drive to the mountains for a day hike. Even if there are fewer cars (which is mostly about the economics) there will absolutely be more car-miles with autonomous systems.

It would probably be much more expensive

If all you pay is the marginal cost then those that live an hour away will pay six times those that live ten minutes away

I'm assuming I own the vehicle. Whether there's a driver or a computer, I also assume that routine 2-4 hour round trips in a taxi of some form aren't going to be viable for most people.

Yeah, I was offered tickets to a bowl game that’s about three hours away - but it won’t end until around 11 pm, and I have to be at work at 6:30 am the next day.

No way I can do that and be functional the next day, but if the car could drive itself, I’d probably be going.

This is already a reality with the fully electric self-driving tech we have now: trains. And no, people still dislike long commutes, even if they can play steam deck on the train.

I lived the mechanical turk version of this for years: riding a corporate shuttle to work.

I prefer Caltrain.

I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any different than the existence of taxis.

The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car usage growth.

EDIT: Some specificity: How would robotaxis replace commuting for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The taxi has to move at least from the storage to the rider pickup to the rider dropoff. Without sharing, that's actually more miles and the same number of cars.

Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's more miles, fewer cars in existence (since both riders dont need a car), but the same number of car trips (plus the to/from storage).

With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven is just going up unless people change their lifestyle. That doesn't do anything to curb care useage.

It's a lot harder to artificially constrain autonomous taxis with taxi medallions.

I think I did the monthly costs to do short commutes with just uber or taxis and it is easily in the high hundreds or low thousands a month (for me, doing a 20ish minute commute each way)

If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.

You factor in intelligent ride sharing and you could halve the number of cars on the road most days.

> If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.

So the leap here is based on "Autonomous taxi companies will charge less per ride than rideshare"?

perhaps.

Is it really the case that those charges are high because the drivers are getting paid so much, or because the vehicles and things like deadheading are expensive? Uber’s been driving driver compensation down for years but there’s only so much room for further reductions and it’s not like the hardware or support for self-driving systems is free.

yeah, I'm not familiar on the economics of it, and I'm not saying you should buy stock in autonomous vehicle companies. This was more of musing that in theory, if the economics of ride sharing are low enough, it could compete with people buying or leasing cars.

Once there is adequate competition, autonomous taxis should be much cheaper.

This can be said for taxis as well, though, right? What's the difference?

Uber tries that, but it turns out in many places you can't offer human-driven taxis much cheaper once you put them on equal footing regarding insurance and other relevant regulations and stop running the service at a loss.

No need to pay a human and fewer total cars because they can operate mostly 24hr/day

Most traffic occurs during the morning and evening commute, you'll need roughly the same number of vehicles for those surges unless those norms change as well.

Can't taxis already operate 24hrs a day? Just rotate out the drivers.

They can, but nobody wants a ride except drunks. Which is one reason why taxis look so bad: when a significant portion of your clients are drunk (throwing up in the back, peeing on the seats and all the other things they do) you don't want a nice car. Nice taxis don't work those shifts. If there is a big shared car market (I doubt it) you will see cars for different times of the day as a profile for potential drunk rider.

Except that our experience shows that over time competition decreases and things like regulatory capture happen so it becomes harder for anyone small to enter into competition and then prices get hiked up.

And the cars and autonomous driving software itself is becoming more expensive and more subscription-based over time so those rents are going to have to be passed on to the consumer. Large autonomous taxi services may be able to strike better deals or even build their own software/vehicles if they're big enough, but you're not going to be able to compete with them effectively by purchasing a Tesla (and presumably consumer prices will rise as there's less individual-owned vehicles and companies go seeking after only the highest margins and abandon the toyota-corolla market to the robotaxi corporations).

Here are a couple of possibilities. Working aged person sends their car to their elderly parent's place so that they can use the vehicle to do their groceries. Families with kids in various activities can get the car to deliver and pickup all the kids at the appropriate times without needing multiple vehicles if the parents need to accompany some of the children. Car pooling becomes more acceptable because you can sleep during the detours to pick people up.

In reality, I don't think it is useful to try to enumerate these small immediate changes that are distinct from the availability of taxis. The long term cultural shift of having autonomous vehicles may lead people to fundamentally share vehicles in a different way. This may lead to a situation where fewer vehicles are driving more miles.

> Car pooling becomes more acceptable because you can sleep during the detours to pick people up.

Only if it is always picking the same people up. Otherwise this is a big negative. People often need to arrive someplace on time. If my car had decided to take a detour to pick someone else up and made me late for my early meeting I'd be mad. Car pools work - to the extent they do - because it is always the same people who need to arrive at the same time.

There seems to be an implicit assumption in a lot of cases that robo-taxis will drastically slash the price of taxis relative to today. Maybe cut the prices by 50% at best? That's about the delta between me driving my own car versus getting an Uber into the city. It's enough to get me to drive but is certainly not in too cheap to meter territory. And being able to have the vehicle I want with various stuff stored in it today is useful as well.

> I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any different than the existence of taxis.

Cost. The cost of an Uber is way too much for daily travel (vs owning your own car or public transport).

A human-driven taxi needs to pay the driver's salary within an 8 hour shift. An autonomous taxi can run (almost) 24/7, 365 days a year. Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?

Another scenario is someone simply renting out their own car as an autonomous taxi whenever they aren't using it themselves (which is most of the time). Then it'll always be cheaper than current-day taxis because it's just a low-effort bonus source of income to the car owner.

I think the difference in cost between a maybe minimum wage driver and a computer is far less than maybe people assume.

And, for a car driven any reasonable amount, most of the cost is in the mileage.

> Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?

Neither, any savings will trickle up to the investors. The price of robotaxis is going to be just below the limit where it would make sense to own a car.

An autonomous taxi isn't going to make many more trips per day. Every hear of "rush hour?" Turns out most people are moving around the city at the same time of the day, then much less trips in the other parts of the day. (except lunch hour when again all the same people are going to lunch). In the middle of the day the trips people make tend to be different (more likely shopping or delivery: different car type than commuting).

I think most people will try the taxi, but if you already own a car (that is transit doesn't make sense for most trips) you will discover it isn't much cheaper than owning your own car, and your own car is waiting outside when you want to go (one big advantage of owning a car over transit is the car is ready when you want to go instead of having to call or hope one is waiting - if cars need to wait outside your office all day in case your kid gets sick that increases costs). Instead you can just buy a self driving car and then leave your things in the car if you go shopping over lunch - something you cannot do with a shared car.

The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be much lower than taxis, because there are no labor costs. If you have to get to work every day, taking a taxi (if you can even find one) is much more expensive than buying a car and amortizing the cost across its lifetime. As the price of autonomous taxis fall, that will reverse.

That doesn't mean I agree with the GP's point about it lowering car usage overall. The reduced cost of auto taxies also pushes against your reluctance to take one, though perhaps not all the way to "use my car whenever I leave the house" levels. I also think that once people begin replacing their cars with autonomous taxis, they'll sign up for all kinds of taxi subscriptions that will further reduce that reluctance. After all, driving your car now isn't completely free: it still costs you gas money, plus the hassle of actually driving it. And other forms of transportation aren't free either. So the bar here isn't 0.

This is fair. I was unclear about the distinction between fewer cars (supported perhaps by cheap taxis - robotic or otherwise), and car useage (not supported by cheap taxis of any kind).

Once human-driven alternatives (eg. rideshare, taxis) are out-competed by autonomous taxis, what would be the incentive to keep those prices low? Especially if Waymo is the one service with suitably performant autonomous vehicles

Exactly. People imagine some sort of future SciFi benevolence from PCs that is not going to happen.

> The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be much lower than taxis

I see this all the time and I just do not believe it is true. Uber/Lyft/etc undercut taxis for users to take market share, and have drastically raised prices to become marginally profitable.

Autonomous cars are more expensive, and the labor in non-autonomous cars is not the majority of the costs. In NYC, a 1hr Uber could easily cost $100 against a minimum wage of $15.

The idea that a taxi trip becoming cheaper than a car owners marginal car trip would require dramatic dropping of taxi prices. Even halving is not really going to do it, and I don't think removing the driver even halves the costs.

The autonomous taxi boosters also seem to overlook what happens to unattended, unmonitored public infrastructure in urban areas of this country. The reason I stopped using Zipcar in NYC was because they were typically trashed inside by the previous drivers. Now imagine an autonomous taxi that gets turned over 10x as often. Good luck.

The problem is that (in the US) an overwhelming majority of car journeys (and traffic) occur during rush hour. And it's difficult to see how autonomous vehicles could reduce the amount of cars used during rush hour. Rush hour traffic involves a lot of vehicles moving to similar destinations, during the same time window. While some cars could certainly be used for multiple journeys during the same rush hour, most cars would likely sit in parking garages all day, just like today.

This. Uber is very expensive because a human has to get paid. If people could get a car "subscription" for X number of dollars a month and forgo cost of gas, maintenance, insurance, and all the other headaches meanwhile,a company could leverage economies of scale to do all of this I think people would move away from a private car.

This would also reduce the cost on doordash type services so if instead of paying an extra $10 for your food/groceries/everyhing to be delivered you paid orders of magnitude less.

This might reduce the traffic on the road.

The pessimist in me makes me think once they got sufficient market share price would go back up and wed be worse off than before lol.

The only way to reduce traffic without changing your routine is by packing more people in less space, i.e. public transit.

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