I know lots of people who rent or buy-a-share-in apartment blocks. Each apartment block is owned by a company spun off of the construction company that built it.
There are all in a particular european city I am familiar with, but I imagine that system works in other countries too.
If they could instead just pay for the 5% of when they are using it and have it go off and be used by other people the rest of the time, it would probably ending being less expensive overall. There would also be fewer cars around.
Yeah, maybe the GM president once told people to own cars. Maybe that was the right thing at the time. Now circumstances have changed and something else makes more sense. Updating your views to account for new information is not a bad thing.
We buy these cars because we are buying flexibility and time. Even public transportation can take lots of extra time if you aren't in the center of dense service. With my car, I don't have to wait for an Uber, I don't have to plan, I can just go whenever and wherever I want. It also doesn't get exponentially more expensive if I want to go somewhere 1+ hours away. Obviously if you never leave a three block radius, a car would be pretty silly. I'm just trying to say car ownership isn't generally about cost.
Nobody is saying it's going to be illegal to own your own personal car or anything. Sure, if you want to live in the middle of nowhere then you'll probably need your own transportation. For a lot of people it's not going to be as necessary to bother owning your own car when you can call one whenever you need it and it will be there in 5 minutes.
If you can get 90% of the flexibility and time for 10% of the cost that is going to make sense for a lot of people. Not owning a car at all is a much larger difference in savings than owning one that gets 30mpg rather than 20mpg.
Now a lot of the same people that promoted and lobbied for these ideas are trying to sell a "quick fix" in the form of car sharing and other recurring revenue models.
There is no quick fix. The US needs a lot of public infrastructure investment before not owning a car is viable for the majority of people. Uber is not affordable compared to buying a $500 used car from Craigslist if you commute every day and does not solve the problem of navigating big box store "shopping centres" as a pedestrian.
I don't know what city you live in, but where I live the city is pretty difficult to navigate with a car. This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
And besides, the entire point here is that you still have access to a car. You are not facing the problem of navigating a car based infrastructure without a car. The entire idea is that there are cars available on-demand!
I guess we could do nothing and hope that at some point governments figure out to build public transportation in a reasonable time frame for a reasonable amount of money, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that. There is zero reason we can't simultaneously work on more efficiently using the infrastructure we already have.
Non-US governments already have. This isn't incompetence, it's intentional policy.
> This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
Ride sharing has only made this problem worse[1]. Is there any evidence that even more ride sharing will improve the situation? The basic problem is that everyone needs to get into or out of a few central locations at around the same time (typically 9am/5pm). Solving this requires moving people more efficiently (as in more people/m^2 of roadway) than cars, even ride sharing cars, would allow.
[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/report-ride-sharing-inc...
But even if everyone agrees to do it tomorrow, we're talking decades to completely rebuild infrastructure of major cities.
I don't know why this is framed as an either/or choice. Build better public transportation, sure. How about we also use cars more efficiently. Why are you against that?
This statistic is silly. It's like the "you only use 10% of your brain!!1" meme.
I don't disagree with the overall premise and there's definitely cases where it makes sense (especially in cities), but there's a real trade-off being made.
I only use my toilets a small fraction of the day as well, would you suggest we crowdsource them for greater efficiency too?
Also this statistic presumes that cars work better with higher utilization and that's muddy at best. Sure, greater utilization is more efficient but it also means the cars go through parts much faster, require more oil, more fuel obviously. And of course the ride share companies aren't paying to maintain the cars that they are running into the ground.
Freedom to choose has value. Convenience has value.
I keep my cleats in the car, so that I can just pick which day I want to play ultimate frisbee on the spur of the moment. I don't have to decide in advance and pack something. That freedom to make up my mind on the spur of the moment is worth something.
I can be at home, and decide I need something from the grocery store, and just go get it. I don't have to order a car and wait for it to arrive. Once I'm done at the store, I don't have to order another car for the trip back. That "it's ready right now" convenience is worth something. (Yeah, I know, in a decent urban world, the grocery store would be within walking distance. I don't live in that ideal urban world.)
The point is a lot of people are going to decide that maybe they can plan a little in advance on when they want to play ultimate frisbee if it helps them avoid the myriad hassles and expenses of owning a car and that's probably going to be good.
IC cars do last decades if you care for them. Very few people do.
Outside of California and a couple other states making a car pass emissions until it ages out of the emissions testing program at 15-25yr is not cost prohibitive.
>A tranny rebuild isn't cheap.
Transmission replacement is of similar cost and happens around the same mileage as a battery pack replacement.
>I don't know of any cars junked for lack of new car smell.
His point was that the people that buy new cars typically trade them in and buy another new one for reasons other than it being no longer economically viable to run.
The other big item is the software in the car becomes slow, dated, and no longer inter-operates properly with the latest phones.
Both of these factors are significantly mitigated with an EV with OTA updates.
Particularly when the manufacturer makes their latest generation hardware field upgradable, you can buy a new MCU and slot it into a late-model car and get all the latest features and performance.
The Model 3 in particular has an esthetic which IMO is particularly timeless and will not feel dated in 10 or even 20 years.
No car is maintenance free. The question is predictability and TCO. If A) maintenance is predictable, B) TCO remains low, and C) performance is consistent, then people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents.
Maybe the physical appearance of the car, but I guarantee the interior and infotainment system will age poorly in 10-20 years, just like any other car. In fact, it might even age worse.
Try using a 5 year old Android tablet and you'll see what I mean.
> people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents
Some people, but there are a lot of people who buy cars for status, and they won't want to be driving a 10 year old car whether it's financially practical or not.
This aspect will not change just because the cars are more reliable.
Just think about it: a very high mileage car does maybe 300 000 miles. At an average speed of 30 mph that's only 10 000 hours of running, or 420 days continuously. IC engines in generators, excavators, ships, trains, heck even in aircraft routinely do many many multiples of this before they are scrapped.
For any part on a vehicle, IC or EV, it's possible to make it last fifty thousand hours no problem. But value engineering is a thing, so companies will make stuff cheaper and cheaper until it lasts only for 10k hours, or maybe 2k for a "regular replacement part". There is absolutely no reason they won't do exactly the same value engineering on an EV car as an IC car.
Judging by what is happening right now with EV cars already produced long time ago [1] general outcome and EV cars lifespan will be lower than IC cars due to non-available batteries, there are already people who are seriously disappointed [2] and I think that it is going to be worse because lack of affordable batteries replacement is in best interest of car maker companies.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/aocih1/battery_replac...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/b2etie/more_affordabl...
It’s more efficient by fully utilizing each vehicle efficiently for the environment and economically for customers in many ways when debt loads are the biggest issue in recent times...
The ride share services haven't made a dent in the transportation needs of the world.
You know what's necessary? On demand minibusses that go everywhere and are routed to riders along the route to the destination to keep them full. Uber isn't that.