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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind most driving, so self-driving cars are kinda "meh" to me.

But then I think about the ability to pull up to a building and tell my car "go park yourself" and it becomes awesome.

All sorts of great efficiencies pop out, too: a lot filled with self-driving cars could pack them tightly, and when a car needs to be removed, all the other cars move out of the way. Offices, closed businesses, schools, etc, with parking spaces could all become ad-hoc lots at night. (I'd make city ordinances requiring this for building approval). Your car can park in a remote area somewhere, and when you want to leave, your car comes and finds you. Imagine taking a post-dinner stroll towards my car, and at some point you meet up.

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I think the concept owning your car will become mostly a thing of the past. Most of the time, I just need a car to get me from point A to point B. When the car is not performing that function, it's just sitting, taking up space.

Rather than making a car payment, I'd rather pay for a car-on-demand service. Whenever I need a ride, I make a request and a car appears.

Coupling with an electric car makes sense, too. The car will always be charged, or alternatively, only a charged car will pick me up.

Also you can tell it whether you need it for a long drive or a short one, so it can know when to send you an electric car or an internal combustion car. Or whether you need a big car or a small one.

Relevant to your point and this article's Northwest angle, I note that the Car2Go[1] service has become fairly prominent in the Seattle area. It's quite different to services like ZipCar, in that Car2Go has worked out a few key details:

1. Smartphone apps that show you the location of the nearest cars and allow various interaction.

2. The ability to walk up to any car not reserved/in use and take it.

3. Parking deals with the city -- just park in any public parking spot, no worries about metering.

These attributes raise convenience considerably vs. some competing carshare services and remove ceilings on how many vehicles can be injected into the local system.

For anyone following Horace Dediu's Asymcar[2] podcast, Car2Go fits right into their theme of exploring what will really disrupt personal transportation as we know it today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go [2] http://www.asymcar.com/

When public transport is decent, vehicles become a luxury. So really, this sounds like the continuation of Los Angeles-style mandated luxury to justify the expense of a white elephant property. Instead, finding someplace less committed to a lower threshold for net lifetime greenhouse emissions, expense and digging in mud on union hours appears preferable.

I wonder what society will be like once self-drivings cars are ubiquitous. There'd be so much reclaimed real-estate from giant parking lots.

Why, will they not need to be parked anywhere?

You need less cars to serve the needs of the currently-in-motion population than for everyone to own their own car. The idea is, a smaller percentage of cars are parked at any given time, and can meet demand with fewer cars. Fewer cars, less parking required.

You will not need as many total cars as they can be shared and most people do not use them most of the time anyway. Think health clubs and Internet service provided by telcos. They can be oversubscribed by designed because providers know that not everyone will use simultaneously.

Well, they wont have to take up prime real estate. You could move them somewhere cheaper to build, and in a dense arrangement.

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