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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

The wind was really taken out of my self-driving sails when Musk pointed out there's no reason for a company with true self-driving cars to actually sell them to consumers instead of adding them to a massive and profitable taxi fleet. The best thing for consumers is an almost-self-driving car that's virtually uncrashable.

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The best thing for consumers is a self-driving car that lasts forever, obeys the user unconditionally, can recharge itself via solar power and doesn't fuel some billionaire's eternal rent seeking.

Sadly solar power isn't dense enough currently to provide really meaningful charging to EVs when constrained to the surface of the car itself.

Yeah. Maybe one day though...

Even if you were able to collect 100% of the insolation hitting the car it's still a fraction of the power in a battery pack. Unfortunately the car won't be at the optimal angle and in full sun most of the time either so it'll still be at best 10 or so miles a day probably and even that requires way better cells than we have now. There's not really a way around the need to charge from a larger power source, at best there's the option to charge from your home solar.

https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolat...

If using this taxi fleet is cheaper than owning a car and you can have a car outside your house in at most, say, 5 minutes then most consumer will be happy to take it.

Choosing no car maintenance, no other hassle and cheaper is a no brainer.

The externalities are here the issue. Tesla becoming a huge monopoly and charging exorbitant prices for the taxis. Or refusing to drive you ever again because that one time you puked when drunk at 2am. So you need to go to hospital now? Well tough luck.

Centralization of power is not good and laws ought to be enacted that producers of self driving cars must not also own them as taxi fleets.

> refusing to drive you ever again because that one time you puked when drunk at 2am

Don't think it would happen, the fleet company will simply charge you for the cleaning and refuse service for you only if you refuse to pay the cleaning bill. People will be very careful to keep the car clean if they pay for the cleaning.

Also, it's unlikely only one company will have full self driving cars, so there will be competing fleets.

I doubt it. Real people, especially parents with children, like to be able to store stuff in their cars. They don't want to deal with waiting, or dirty cars used by random other people.

Dirty cars would be reported, so the previous user has to pay for the cleaning and the current user could get a free ride for the inconvenience. If people have to pay for cleaning then they will pay attention to keep the car clean.

Of course, the service is only a real alternative if a car is there within 5 minutes for you. People wouldn't tolerate more waiting.

It will be a gradual process and some people will still prefer to own a car, but in the long run owning a car could be a luxury if the driverless taxi really matures and it becomes much cheaper.

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