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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

The economics won't support it being your car for long, at that point.

When you can just ask for a car to pick you up and one will arrive, corporate robo-taxi fleets will have economies of scale over family cars sent off to earn their keep. With ordinary people not needing to buy a car, facilities for maintaining and supplying them will dry up too, as the manufacturing effort shifts to taxi-ready cars for fleets. And the price will shift up out of your range to reflect the earning potential.

The robo-car will end the private car as anything but a hobby comparable to the classic car.

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Doubtful. In Sf, there are several companies running into problems scaling up to this type of model (ZipCar, Uber, Scoot). Often there aren't enough cars/scooters to meet demand, or the wait for one to arrive will be too long. People who value their time will always be willing to buy one of their own so they will be guaranteed a ride where and when they want it. Not to mention the cost of maintaining such a fleet.

It's also worth noting this type of service is only effective in dense urban centers. Enough people live in the country/rural/suburban areas where owning a car is necessary.

Americans spend a ridiculous amount of money on cars as status symbols. It'll be a long, long time before that ceases to be the case.

Maybe you meant the robo-car will end the private car in cities where its citizens focus on different status symbols? I can see that being the case in SF and maybe NY in the near future, but not anywhere else in the US.

"there aren't enough cars/scooters to meet demand" because nowadays, a car needs a driver who isn't busy doing anything else. They will be far less rare when unoccupied cars can go in search of fares.

Zipcar and Scoot aren't cab companies. The cars sit without drivers until somebody reserves one online and picks it up. The only difference here is the car can pick you up and drive you instead of having to drive it yourself. Self driving cars don't magically solve every problem I've listed. All they mean is you don't have to drive yourself and it can park itself far away. More efficient traffic flows? Absolutely! Less traffic congestion? You bet! The end of the personal car? not by a long shot.

Definitely this. The average car sits in the drive way 22 hours a day. It may not seem like it at first, but an all-taxi economy will be much cheaper for the riders (think about paying for 1 millionth the cost of maintaining 1 million cars at once, as opposed to 100% of the cost of maintaining one car).

Agree with your point. It raises another question for me - if we are talking about shared or non-owned vehicles that people interchangably call and use when they need to go somewhere, aren't we inching closer to the same experience that other means of public transportation provide? And shouldn't we give those equal consideration to a world that is still built for and dominated by cars? For all the benefits we are all citing here, there are still a lot of problems with a world dominated by cars (pollution, the space they take up, the roads they require that cut up communities and are inhospitable to pedestrians / other modes of transportation, etc.)

Space waste happens because(1) ego, which means buying big and snarly cars to look like an action hero, (2) over-provision of car space, because you sit in one seat of a five-seat car on the off chance you might have passengers or cargo (3) cars parked, idle.

Robo-taxis have an economic attractor at the "runs forever, gets good mileage" end of the design scale, because energy and maintenance are the biggest ongoing costs. There would be incentives to make them small and efficient, maybe sized for one occupant. And they would not sit around idle, so they would need a long MTBF, which rules out designing for speed or beefiness and suggests electric (it's got fewer moving parts).

All of which means, fewer, smaller, cleaner, slower, simpler, vehicles. Aesthetes will pine for the days of muscle cars. In terms of green-ness, they may come to eclipse buses etc, while retaining the advantages of cars (goes where you want, when you want, and is not full of strangers).

Except no company is going to want to buy enough cars to handle the demand during rush hour.

Given those cars make two reliable paying journeys per day, minimum, why wouldn't they?

Because two is not enough.

3D printers, build and reclaim fleetcars on the fly?

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