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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Ownership of the car won’t be necessary. As a passenger car sits idle 95 percent of the time, there are plenty of alternative options.

Every time I see someone say "all cars will be rentals in the future" I think if all the people I know who have stuff kicking around in the trunk that they use occasionally but rarely. The automotive version of "every-day carry". Some of it's basic car maintenance stuff. Some of it's not.

And then I also think about the people I know whose passenger or back seat is a giant pile of trash because there's no easy-to-empty integrated place for trash and it all just ends up on the floor...

Also to quote this incredibly relevant point from fartaspoobutt [dead]: [1]

The car I really want is a network of fast, affordable, widely available public transit.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738780

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The sitting idle 95% of the time isn’t super meaningful. What percentage of cars are used at rush hour? Not 100%, but a lot more than 5%. What matters is meeting peak demand, not average demand.

Remote working and elastic hours will hopefully decrease that peak considerably. Especially now with coronavirus proving that it's not that scary.

We can also provide everyone with 8 hours of sleep while eliminating 2/3rds of the beds if we sleep in shifts and trade off occupancy of our homes with strangers while we're out. Oilfield workers and submariners do this, after all, and they turn out fine.

I have a growing suspicion that car futurism deep down is just about distracting people from thinking about public transit.

I grew up in a small apartment. The car was basically an extra closet for summer sports gear like hiking shoes, poles, etc.

My toothbrush sits idle 95% of the time. I don't want to rent it.

It costs 3 orders of magnitude less and you put it in your mouth. Not a great analogy.

My car sits idle for 99.9% of the time (I make less than 2000 km per year, and vast majority of that in a few long trips each year). It would probably be cheaper for me to rent a car for vacation trip and go by taxi the other 10 times a year I need it for city driving. But we already have a car and it's been in the family since 1997 and it doesn't break so we keep it.

I would love to have a way to pay a reasonable yearly fee and have a good car available when I need it without paying for the parking space, insurance, maintanance, etc. But as it is renting a car is too much hassle.

It feels like I'm renting mine every time I buy a new set of brushes.

> Ownership of the car won’t be necessary. As a passenger car sits idle 95 percent of the time, there are plenty of alternative options

One could say the same thing about clothes.

Rent the runway is a billion dollar company. A bigger issue is the danger of deplatforming and corporate terms of services when it comes to fundamental transport infrastructure.

it'll work better for some people than others. the only stuff I (deliberately) leave in my car is a tire pressure gauge and a bicycle pump, along with the spare tire and related tools that came with the vehicle. if it's not my car and I'm allowed to just ditch it and get another one whenever there's a problem, I wouldn't need any of that stuff.

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