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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

You have five or six revolutions happening all at once. Self-driving isnt going to revolutionize car ownership. People own cars for irrational reasons (fashion etc). Nor will self-drive suddenly make carpooling cool.

>> reasonably dense self-driving vanpools and small busses pop up.

Utopia much?

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Alternatives probably will decrease ownership at the margins. For example, I know a couple in SF who don't own a car and that wouldn't have been nearly as practical before Zipcar and Uber.

However, it's not like paying a driver $100/day to drive a minibus around to pick people up and drop them off is likely the reason that isn't a widespread service today. So someone would need to explain to me why self-driving changes that equation.

I own my car for pretty rational reasons: to commute to and from work, and to run other errands in and around the medium sized city I live near.

And to carry a car seat for the toddler, and a bike rack, and a change of clothes for the gym, and a bumper sticker saying "26.2" to say you've done a marathon, and some tools because after the gym you're going to fix your parents' sink, and a bag of sand because the roads have iced up where they live.

Quite rational reasons for why a driverless taxi won't work.

And some of us have very practical reasons not to ever rely on others for transport. I'm in the military. I'm expected to be able to get to work no matter what. We are in a tsunami area. Should that happen and my unit be stood up to respond, I need a vehicle that will get me to work even when the power/cell towers are all out. My CO doesn't want to hear that I cannot get in because the Uber app on my phone is down. Without private vehicle ownership we would all have to live on our bases.

Those are funny things to get upset over. Most of those don't sound irrational if you have the need, but I don't have any of those. I never knew what that "26.2" bumper sticker meant. I do have a CUV for the winter snow and ice though. Also, I don't think taxis, let along driverless ones, service my area which is out in the country (rural) even though it's only 30 minutes from downtown.

"upset"? I don't understand how that's relevant to this thread.

sandworm101 mentioned "People own cars for irrational reasons". I wanted to add some rational reasons for owning a car, beyond what RightMillennial wrote.

Many people don't have a car and don't need a car. The point is that there are reasons for owning a car beyond 'irrational' things like fashion and coolness.

Sorry, I thought you were being sarcastic and criticizing those things people use cars for.

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