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Comment by slyall | Hacker News Reader

"...the Google cars look like something one buys for their four year old niece or nephew. "

You have to stop thinking like some guy from Mad Men and more like somebody buying AWS instances.

Imagine that instead of buying a single car that you drive everywhere you instead reserve a car for your daily commute, you might get various options, eg:

  $500/month - Tesla Sports car, 30min journey, unshared occupancy
  $300/month - 2 seat Google-Car, 30min journey, unshared
  $125/month - 8 seat van, 40min journey, shared, up to 1 vehicle change

Now if you are a go-getter gunning for VP you'll pick the sports car. But others might not see the extra expense as being worth it.

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First, I'm pretty far away from "some guy from Mad Men". That's actually quite a reach into my psyche; it would be interesting to see how you came to such an incisive reading while knowing so little about me.

But as far as the business model, as someone that does not own a car but instead utilizes a mix of public transit, bicycle, ZipCar (sometimes renting the VW Golf, sometimes the Jeep, etc.), and Uber to get around, I still think the Google car looks like something one buys for their four year old niece or nephew, and have faith that a car could check all the boxes functionality wise and still be designed to look, nice, at least. Maybe even really nice.

> $125/month - 8 seat van, 40min journey, shared, up to 1 vehicle change

This is interesting -- it's basically a little autonomous bus, for essentially the same price as a regular one, that might pick up/drop off at a more convenient location, minus someone there to supervise. I kind of like having a bus driver.

But would you rather walk 3 blocks in the rain (or snow) to a bus, wait at the stop for it to come, then walk another 3 blocks to your office, or would you rather have the minibus pick you up at your door and drop you at your office? Point-to-point travel is where self-driving cars excel - even if you're sharing the vehicle with others so you don't have a direct trip.

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