Hacker News Reader

Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

If you don't need to drive why would you buy a driverless car?

I don’t anticipate many people will ever buy a driverless car.

The whole concept of buying a car is kind of ridiculous. You pay for it then you continue paying for registration, insurance, maintenance, park, etc all while it sits idle 90% of the time.

Driverless cars allow you to be picked up at your front door and dropped off exactly at the spot wherever and whenever you want for a low fee per trip. And we’ll need about 1/10 the number of cars that we have today.

View on HN

You buy a car because it is there for you. When you want to go it is always where you left it and ready to go. People tend to forget about this: you don't have to reserve your ride ahead of time, you just go when you are ready. To be useful shared cars will be idle most of the time as well: if they are not you cannot be sure one is ready and waiting for you when you decide you want to go. Otherwise you may as well take the bus which is cheaper than a shared car can ever be because more people are on it at a time.

Since there isn't much savings possible in a shared car without losing the whole advantage of a car you may as well buy your own: the ability to leave your golf clubs in it is more than worth the extra costs.

Many people's cars are idle at the same time and in use at the same time.

Just because everyone's car is idle 90% of the time doesn't mean that we can replace the fleet with a driverless fleet that is 1/10th the size.

No state has an average commute time of over 31 minutes for solo drivers, while peak commuting time is several hours long. We could easily get by with less than half of the number of vehicles.

> all while it sits idle 90% of the time.

Thought experiment: Most of your clothes sit idle 90% of the time.

Most of your clothes sit idle 90% of the time.

I have a cup full of pennies in my closet that sit idle all the time too and I don't care... cause they're pennies.

Similarly, the average car cost over $35,000 in 2018. That's a sizable expense for most people. Clothes in comparison, not so much.

Whoosh :)

>I don’t anticipate many people will ever buy a driverless car.

Unless buying a fleet of vehicles over time produces better gains/results than other retirement/investment options (fossil fuel divestment or 401k replacements, plus having the convenience of immediate SDC access).

I think cars embody the classic american spirit of freedom and "wind in your hair" fleeting moments.

After gen-x, the cost of vehicles skyrocketed to parity with what modest accomodations used to cost, so the younger generations are writing their story with a much different frame of reference.

I enjoy the saying "In America,100 years is a long time and in Europe, 100 miles is a long distance".

I buy cars so that I can leave my stuff in them instead of having to load and unload every day. That convenience is worth a lot. Whether the car drives itself or not is an entirely separate issue.

Somehow I doubt work would be willing to relax their weapons policies so that I could bring in the training weapons that sit in my car.

In most states they don't have a legal choice in the matter.

A lot of those benefits can be had from taxis - and yet people still buy their own cars.

Taxis are expensive because they require a human to drive them. Hence the reason the SDC could change that dynamic. A shared car that does not require an expensive human to drive it.

Another model are shared cars, like dockless scooters and bikes. They are reasonably popular in the Netherlands for example. But they still require quite a bit of planning to ensure the car is available, and they are not always "in front of your door". Also you need to rent it for the entire time that you're away.

Irrespective, SDC will take some time. Like NLP, they work will within a constrained problem domain, but don't really generalise.

But I'm sure I have done the arithmetic and worked out that taxis would be a lot cheaper than buying cars - but I still ended up buying a car.

Mind you I live in a rural area and spend a fair amount of time (1 day week) in areas with no or very poor mobile phone coverage so that might put me off!

> Taxis are expensive because they require a human to drive them. Hence the reason the SDC could change that dynamic. A shared car that does not require an expensive human to drive it.

Human driver's only account for 50% - 55% of a cab's cost.

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-taxis-can-tell...

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-breakdown-of-where-taxi-fa...

"Only" half of the cost? That's more than enough to make it economically viable for a large chunk of the population.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com