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Comment by petters | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the primary use case of self-diving cars aren't personal ownership. Society as a whole wastes a lot of resources when every household has a car that stands still 95% of the time. With self-driving cars, we can plausibly improve that.

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We could significantly improve it now with more Zipcar type apps (at least in cities where people live close together) but the most people want guaranteed access to a vehicle at 8am and 5:30pm weekday situation isn't easily solved just by making them mobile when not in operation. Nor - at least in the short term - is people's tendency to use cars, and especially cars with no previous owners, as a status symbol (many people could save more of their income not buying new models and premium marques than allowing it to be used by someone else at weekends and some evenings, but they choose the car that takes up more of their disposable income all the same)

Agreed. I also think another big reason for personal car ownership is having kids. With the increasing ages/weights recommended and/or required by law for car seats, that can be a hassle if trying to use a ride sharing service. It increases difficulty with increased number of kids at varying ages. For those without kids, while it's not crazy difficult to install a car seat, it can still take upwards of 5-15 minutes (depending on the style of seat). This amount of time lost can be a big hindrance.

Yes, I know that Uber has started to tackle this problem, but as far as I know it only provides 1 car seat, and a car equipped this way may not always be nearby. Maybe this will be a completely solved problem soon, which would be great!

Lots of people are single. Lots of people's kids are grown. Lots of people could own one car for the kids stuff and car-share the second vehicle as needed. Even with private ownership for cases like children, the total number of cars on the road could decrease considerably.

I don't really buy this argument. Most of he stuff I own is sitting idle 95% of the time (except for computer I guess ;) and it is similar with other people I know. The outcome will depend on many factors, including cost of the car, the secondary functions it will get and similar (will it become an extension of our living space?).

Heck. I have ladders/weedwhackers/etc. and other home/yard-maintenance and upkeep devices that probably sit idle for 99.9% of the time.

If your ladder could deliver itself to someone for $10/hr. (or a ladder could be delivered to you on demand) I suspect we'd have a lot less ladders.

Maybe. There's an equipment rental place about a 10 minute drive away and, while I have rented from there, it really needs to be a once every multiple years sort of thing for the economics to work out. Something I use even just a few times a year doesn't make sense.

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