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Comment by victorronin | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of merit to what the author is saying.

However, he completely ignores externalities. Yes, car is not used 95% of time. And he is saying, let's target the 5%. The problem is that it's not 5%, it's rather 3% of planned trips where his model works really well and 2% when you need a car right now and oh... the demand for local car share through the roof, so please wait for next 20 minutes.

And the same is true for everything else. People are buying extra on one hand to use it, but on another case to be an insurance that they can accommodate unplanned.

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But some of that 2% it's fine to put off, and the chance of the demand for local cars being through the roof at any particular moment is less than 1% of that, so now buying a car means optimizing for that 1/10000 case. How much is that worth to you?

Let me start from another end. Owning a car (a couple of year old, not luxury) could be $400 month (deprecation, parking, insurance, gas, fixes, etc). Taking Uber to drive the same trips will cost you let say $300/month. Please don't read too deep into a specific number, this are all guestimates (they obviously wary in different places). As a result, you save $1200/year, which is nice. You are asking why I am optimizing for 1/10000 case and how much is that worth? Well... Here are a couple of scenarios, you need to drive a kid to an emergency room at 1am or super important business meeting popped up out. How much is it worth you? May be such events happens once in several years, but the price tag on them could be way-way higher than your savings. This is exactly why I used word "insurance". Why does anybody buy insurance? The probably is 1/10000 to get into trouble. The issue is that the price tag of this 1/10000 is too high to ignore.

For the emergency room, I can call an ambulance. For a business meeting, I really doubt it's that important, and why can't I use Uber for this?

Not everything needs insurance. And real insurance has costs that are pretty close to the expected average risk, while buying things just in case could be much more.

And the 1/10000 calculation was not the chance of huge trouble, it's 1/10000 to be unable to get a ride to have any trouble at all. The vast majority of those incidents are going to be worth much less than a thousand dollars. The chance of an event being that major is another factor of 1% or less.

Am I going to pay a thousand dollars a year to avoid a one in a million chance each of missing some important business meetings? Definitely not. Especially when other factors I can't change are much more likely to make me miss a meeting.

I mean, if I had odds that low of major illness I probably wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars a month for health insurance either!

>For the emergency room, I can call an ambulance.

As someone who had siblings that required various visits to the hospital for emergency things, using an ambulance each time would have paid for a couple of new cars.

Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.

> As someone who had siblings that required various visits to the hospital for emergency things, using an ambulance each time would have paid for a couple of new cars.

If it happens that often then the article wouldn't advise you against having a car.

> Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.

If you're going to the emergency room you'll probably be waiting plenty long once you get there.

There are other reasons to own a car - one of them is "comfort". Yes maybe I have to maintain it and it's definitely more expensive then renting in the long run, but man, I have a comfortable, safe car that I can use with no overhead to get out of town on a whim.

With COVID, I avoid taxis & ubers; I can take a zipcar-like rental with relatively low overhead, but one isn't always available next to me. When it is, it's sometimes not very clean. Those services have small-ish vehicles (and mostly electric ones) that are fine for city & surroundings, but if I want a weekend getaway I need to use real rental, and that's a lot more overhead (plus, if I get out 3 weekends per month, just the rentals would be more expensive than the car costs - and that, at a lower quality of the rented car; with COVID I don't get out as often, but previously, I used to).

I think living without a car definitely makes sense for some people; and definitely doesn't for others. But that depends a lot on your conditions, location and lifestyle.

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