Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the problem with centralized car ownership: Everyone wants access to a car at roughly the same time. Everybody in your "carshare" will want the car at 8AM & 5PM on weekdays, and all day on weekends.

Thus, the "carshare" company will need almost as many cars as it has subscribers- at which point you will be paying $300/month instead of $50/month, comparable to paying a loan on your own car.

Of course, pricing models can pressure some people to give up the car on weekends or drive to work at 7AM, so the "carshare" can indeed have somewhat fewer cars than it has subscribers. However, unless it can cause a dramatic shift in usage and field far fewer vehicles than it has subscribers, the cost of subscribing will be so close to owning a car many people will opt to continue owning their own.

I'm told ZipCar already suffers from this, and by nature is most popular among people who need a car extremely infrequently- a fairly small portion of the population.

I mostly agree with this. Any rational business model would probably require some demand and usage based pricing, and if you are using a shared car the same way you would if you owned it (i.e. commuting to work during peak hours, weekend trips), than it should come out to roughly the same cost as ownership. However, in high density urban areas, parking is still a real pain. In my opinion, this is really where the potential for driver less cars is. A dedicated parking spot can be expensive, and street parking can be a nightmare.

the "carshare" company will need almost as many cars as it has subscribers

Citibike has 60,000 members but only 6,000 bicycles. But they're always around to use. Are bikes somehow magically different than cars?

> Are bikes somehow magically different than cars?

It's not so much that bikes are magically different than cars, but that NYC has many more viable transportation alternatives than ordinary American cities. If you find yourself missing a bike for the return trip, public transport is a reliable backup in NYC. This is not the case in most other cities in the US.

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