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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>Price is the kicker here though. When I own a car, I can pretty much drive as frequently or infrequently as I want.

if you've ever actually sat down and priced out how much each usage of your car costs you, it's not that good of a deal. Personal vehicles seem cheap because people treat them as a non-optional fixed cost, but between the cost of the vehicle itself, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and your time spent driving you can price a car service fairly high and still have it compare favourably to owning a car.

The trick will just be to convince people to start thinking about a car service the same way they currently think about their car payments or fuel costs. I'd be curious to see what a per-month subscription service would look like instead of a per-ride fee structure like taxis or ubers currently use. $300-400/mo for unlimited rides would be, for me, a better deal than owning a car. I'm curious if that could be profitable.

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I have priced it out, as I don't like driving, and it was cost me insanely more to taxi/etc. I didn't even get done pricing, tbh heh.

It's roughly a $50-$70 ride for me every morning to work. That already puts me over triple my car payment. The other random trips to the store/etc would be far cheaper, thankfully, but depending on usage I can't imagine it being less than my gas costs in a month (roughly $50/m). There's still repairs/insurance/licensing/etc, but I doubt they're costing me the $700 extra that just driving to work would be costing me via taxi.

The problem is I don't live in the city, so my distances are greater, and tend to be very anti-taxi.

I actually want to take an uber to town on the weekends so I can drink/etc at dinner, but I usually don't because of how expensive it is.

Mind you, I don't think it's unfairly priced currently - but that still doesn't make it as cheap as I'd need it to be to use all the time.

Wow, how far do you drive to work? Maybe a cheap one-seater electric car would work for you?

One of the problems with cheap one-seater cars is that they are better suited for short distances than long highway commutes. Being in a tiny car next to a semi truck at highway speeds can get dicey.

Agree completely with you.

That being said, owning a car is still a must if you have anything close to an outdoor lifestyle. For example:

Leaving the car at the trailhead several hundred miles from home for the whole weekend.

With Uber and Lyft, I already see my friends living an Urban lifestyle completely dumping their car. When this will become automated, another portion will likely dump their car.

But for now at least, I cannot see the outdoor crowd, or the ones living in a real rural area (think opposite of the SF hipster) dumping their car.

I actually think rentable self-driving cars would be useful for the trailhead problem. For non-spur trails especially, organising a shuttle service is a bit of a pain and relatively expensive.

> owning a car is still a must if you have anything close to an outdoor lifestyle

Nothing honors the beauty of nature like polluting it.

That is a huge misconception. You can get to rural beauty with mass transit and/or a bicycle in metro NYC actually. My friends regularly organize a bike ride where we take the metro north to rural Putnam County then bike back the 30 some miles. You can go miles without seeing anyone but a tree and a snake...

You can take the Long Island Railroad to Montauk.

New Jersey Transit will take you to the shore.

There's a bus that will take you to Hunter Mountain to go skiing in the Catskills.

Look up maps of the above 3 train systems. In many cases you can take a train, then bike the last couple miles, and end up in a very very isolated place.

I can also go to places that feel isolated and rural like the Jamaica Bay, the Pelham Bay Park area, or Inwood Hill Park, but are technically not because they're so adjacent to developed areas. But they do feel locally rural if you avoid a view that lets you see the city, because there is a jump discontinuity in density.

Also, you can do traditional car trips and just rent a car for the weekend. City people do this crap all the time. You really think we don't get outdoors, huh?

Demand more from your transit systems!

There are at least one or two counterexamples - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimmelwald

Personally, I live in the city and like getting out but I just use Gocar (pay by hour car rental)

Since you live out of the city I guess an ideal/cheap solution would involve some sort of matching so that you can share a ride with other people going the same way.

This sort of thing, funny enough, was actually the origin story of one of the major ridesharing services.

(Lyft was originally just a little side project of Zimride, which was meant to link people who were already going on a trip between the same points)

With AI driven cabs, it's definitely going to be cheaper. Think about it, it's almost like co-owning a single car with a pool of users, isnt it? Unless the taxi company(Waymo or Uber) keeps a lot of profit with themselves, it should actually turn out cheaper to use an AI driven cab, especially during non-peak hours. But peak time pricing would be higher as a limited amount of cabs can't serve everyone during peak hours. And you won't get the freedom you have with your own vehicle.

> Unless the taxi company(Waymo or Uber) keeps a lot of profit with themselves, it should actually turn out cheaper to use an AI driven cab, especially during non-peak hours.

Yup, that's my concern. Hypothetically a lot of things should be cheaper, but without market pressure, there's no reason for it to be cheaper.

Eg, if we pretend that an AI company releases an amazing self driving car everywhere tomorrow. Years ahead of their competition. That means the only market force they have is to price it under taxis. Perhaps they could price it at as low as possible to get more people using it, but without the market pressure it seems less likely. ... then again, I'm clearly talking out of my element here, not an educated response haha.

I’ve priced it out. It didn’t make sense for me to buy a car while I was living in Beijing, taxis were too convenient and affordable. As soon as I moved to LA, it was more expensive but I had a walkable commute, having a baby changed all the dynamics however so I bought my first car in 12 years. The car seat problem is real.

This is what probably keeps me out of the market for a car rental service too. I realize I'm probably in the minority, but trying to fit three car seats and several adults into an Uber is near impossible. Not to mention of it's a one way trip, what do you do? Carry the seats with you, arrange to get them back on a later date?

Personally, I'd much rather buy a car with this technology, than rent it.

If Waymo's safety record holds, we can hope for a world with sufficiently-few crashes that car seats become unnecessary.

Good luck getting states to change their laws anytime soon. Ironically enough, car seats aren’t required on buses not because they aren’t needed, but they would cut off the poor with kids completely from transportation.

Also probably helps that public buses are really really safe statistically.

The driver is regulated at the state level. Safety standards for vehicles are regulated federally.

They’re already statistically unnecessary for toddlers on up: http://freakonomics.com/2005/07/09/more-evidence-on-car-seat...

This is a big enough market I'd be surprised if there isn't just a checkbox on the app "Do you want the taxi that responds to be one equipped with (0 / 1 / 2) child car seats?"

They did eventually add an option, but it's still very limited (single car seat only, not as many drivers have them, and no newborns).

AAA says average cost is $8.5k a year or $700 a month:

https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/cost-to-own-a-vehicle/

If you have a cheap reliable car, paltry insurance, and don't drive much you might just get down to $300-400 a month, but I think you're also underestimating your cost.

Before people using the car for work or just for commuting to work make the switch to ai cars these need to provide some serious sla guarantees, because the cost in lost opportunity for a no show can be quite high.

$700/month ($175/week, $20-$35/day) is a lot less than Uber costs for a daily commuter + weekend activity.

It's only that high, if you're making car payments and/or driving hundreds of miles a week. The page also specifies this only applies to new cars, as of 2017.

As long as the car payments aren't high and the commutes not really long, it's pretty reasonable. If your commutes are that long, a service would be outrageous. E.g., a company paid for my Uber trip from SF to Los Altos back in 2012, and it cost $125.

I'm a statistical outlier fortunately. My car with excellent insurance costs me < $100/month.

My car is old but reliable. KBB says it's worth about $2,500 with 140k miles on it. It's made by Toyota and the total cost of repairs in the 60k miles I've owned it is has been less than $300 (alternator, battery, a belt, and some fluids), so I think it's reasonable to assume I'll get at least another 60k miles out of it with less than $1k in repairs.

If we assume the worst case scenario where the car is worthless after the next 60k miles and I have to spend $1k repairing it, that's a total cost of 5.8 cents a mile. At 10k miles/year, that comes out to $48/month. I don't pay interest on a loan for it, but even if I did it would only be another $8/month at 4% APR.

It gets 25 MPG, at 10k miles/year and $2.50/gallon, that's another $83/month.

My insurance is $30/month. $48 + $8 + $83 + $30 = $169/month, well below $300-400.

FWIW, I actually only drive about 6k miles a year, so my actual cost is only $29 + $8 (opportunity cost) + $50 + $30 = $117/month.

Assuming less than 1k in repairs/maintenance on a car with over 140k miles over the course of 60k miles on it is incredibly optimistic. Just oil changes + brake pads + tire replacements would eat a good chunk of that, let alone something actually going wrong.

I also had a car that was reliable, a 2002 CRV...well, it was reliable until we got past the 150k mark or so, then it started costing us big time to replace shit.

What if your car will completely break down? You need to add the cost of the car to your valuations for this to be viable.

The full value of the car ($2.5k) + $1k is included.

This is not the value of the car. This is the value of YOUR car. A car you know and the car you have driven. In case of buying a new car, you cannot be sure that the car will just die a month after buying.

You have probably the cheapest insurance in the US. Realistically, that number is going to be double and that's for state minimum coverage for a low risk driver. At that point, you're self insuring quite a bit and you should add that in.

As others have noted, your repairs probably don't even cover basic maintenance like battery, oil changes, or fluids.

You don't have registration/sales tax in your value of the car.

Do you ever pay for parking or a car wash?

You should probably also add in any taxi or Uber/Lyft rides you already take to get a total transportation cost.

>You have probably the cheapest insurance in the US.

I don't think so, it's just a cheap car. It is well above state minimums (I think minimums are 25k/50k and it's 100k/300k). It includes comprehensive coverage but with a $2k deductible (mostly just useful for rental cars since $2k deductible is most of the value of the car). It has been as low as $20/month in the past.

>As others have noted, your repairs probably don't even cover basic maintenance like battery, oil changes, or fluids.

I specifically mentioned that they did.

>You don't have registration/sales tax in your value of the car.

Ah that's true, that adds about $20/month with emissions testing too.

>Do you ever pay for parking or a car wash?

Fair point, but that's less than $2/month on average.

>I don't think so, it's just a cheap car. It is well above state minimums (I think minimums are 25k/50k and it's 100k/300k). It includes comprehensive coverage but with a $2k deductible (mostly just useful for rental cars since $2k deductible is most of the value of the car). It has been as low as $20/month in the past.

That's crazy cheap. The cheapest I could find for state minimum in Georgia was $60 and that was answering the questions as a perfect driver.

>I specifically mentioned that they did.

But the numbers don't add up. There's no way you spent just $300 in 60,000 miles on maintenance. Oil changes alone would be $300ish. It should also be a brake job, new tires, and things like new wipers. On top of that you replaced an alternator, battery, and a belt change?

>That's crazy cheap. The cheapest I could find for state minimum in Georgia was $60 and that was answering the questions as a perfect driver.

Hm maybe it's just cheaper in Arizona for some reason then. Could definitely see a significant difference in state regulations causing that.

Oh shit I forgot about tires, you're right I was missing some things. Better numbers look like this I think:

Battery: $100

Belt: $20

Alternator: $170

Coolant: $20

Windshield washer fluid: $5

Air filter: $10

Tires: $500

1x Wiper blade: $20

4x oil replacements (I replaced when oil looked discolored, not at 7k miles): $100 ($25/each)

No brake job yet, but that's probably coming soon...

Total: $845

Lack of rain/snow/salt on roads probably reduces maintenance costs by a lot in regions like this, so national averages might be higher.

So after both adjustment my numbers are probably closer to $200/month, and I'll accept that's probably an outlier and $300/month is a reasonable estimate for a cheap car.

I did, since I keep my cars for a long time (13 years and counting), and I drive a lot, cost of fuel is the largest share of my costs. The IRS allows ~$.55/mile (this changes regularly and I can't be bothered to look up the latest number), and I'm at 1/5th.

For my truck the numbers are different, but every time I check it turns out you can't actually use a truck for a lot of the things I use my truck for, so even though my per miles costs are something like $5/mile I don't really have a choice for those uses.

>and I drive a lot,

this is probably the differentiator. I bike to work about 20% of the time in the winter, 80% of the time in the summer, and don't use my car for too much else. So the cost of the car and insurance amortized out over mile driven ends up being pretty high for me.

You also probably have an active partner, probably don’t have kids or some sort of disability, don’t have to go see family out of town, etc., etc. A car gives you a lot more freedom than public transport and is definitely cheaper than taxis (or Uber) for the average person.

But why would self driving cars be significantly more expensive than regular cars? Most of the technologies they use are typically technologies which cost reduces dramatically when mass produced. Electric cars will be more expensive, but the price will likely converge in the long run. I am not entirely convinced car ownership will go away. The main argument in my mind is that most of the commute in a city happens at the same time. So if you want a car guaranteed, you kind of need to lock it in somehow.

I’ve seen reports of $7500 or more just for one Lidar sensor:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/googles-waymo-reduces-lid...

Sure, costs will come down, but the people who have the data (e.g Waymo and GM) seem to be banking on the taxi market, rather than selling these cars.

Using them as taxis makes the initial cost of the sensors less important, not more important, since it's a fixed cost and taxis are driven much more than regular cars (especially true for ones that don't depend on a human driver).

And they will likely be the first customers, until volumes ramp up and prices go down. There are many places where taxis do not make sense or aren't optimal. Low density areas, daily commute at the peak hour in big cities (or in general any place where you have a one way flow), people using their car professionally, etc.

I wonder if Uber pricing will remain as good once they go public and need to show growth and profitability.

Or. Growth or profitability

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