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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this! It's a bit frustrating that there seems to be no acknowledgment of friction being an issue, even though the vast majority of our industry is practically defined by it.

Everyone who's ever worked on a website knows the value of being above the fold, the value of reducing a single click in a checkout, etc.

I lived car-free for many years, and while I had carshares easily available to me and went through the high-friction bits already (had the apps downloaded, accounts signed up, license verified, everything ready to actually rent) - I rarely did it (in fact I did it exactly twice in about 10 years!)

I sympathize with the argument here - having 4,000 lb steel boxes rolling around with a single person in them and no cargo is terribly wasteful, but a lot of the alternatives suggested assume a physics-experiment-like smooth frictionless surface that doesn't actually exist IRL.

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Aren't you completely discounting the friction inherent in ownership of a vehicle? Humans tend to find clever ways to justify their irrational decisions, but there is absolutely more friction involved in owning a large truck that is used to haul cargo once a year versus having the same cargo delivered once a year.

Two things. First, the time of friction is important. Pretty much all friction points with vehicle ownership are distributed throughout the year, *and are amortized across all uses of the vehicle*. When you want the vehicle to haul the mulch you press the button and you get bacon. Contrast with renting a truck to pick up mulch, or renting a restaurant for a party, or putting your parents in a hotel. Those friction points happen every single time you want to do the fun thing, and happen when you want to do the fun thing. Press button, pay tax, *then* get bacon. There's a big psychological difference there.

Second, I think you're framing it as {truck + self pickup} vs {no vehicle + delivered}, but I think the more likely comparison is {truck + self pickup} vs {sedan + delivered}. Nobody's going to get a truck as their only vehicle that they'll literally only use a few times a year. They'll be choosing between truck and sedan as their daily driver (or truck as second vehicle). In the replacement case in particular (truck vs sedan) the friction delta is very small.

The friction is very different.

If you own the vehicle and it breaks you have to fix it - but most of the time it isn't broken. You need to pay insurance, but that comes in a regular bill, and so is easy to budget. In return for this you get a vehicle ready to use when you want to.

If you don't own the vehicle and need one there is a lot more friction: you need to figure out where to get a vehicle. More than once I've gone to get one and found they were sold out and so I couldn't rent when I needed one. More than once I've gone to get one and discovered the fine print didn't let me use it for what I wanted.

Yeah, the people acting like carshares and rentals are low-friction feel like they live in a different universe than the one I lived for over a decade.

Open the app. Oh no, the car that's near my apartment isn't available when I need it. Ok what else is around? Ehhh the BMW is pretty expensive and unnecessary. Ah here's a Honda... but it's a 25 minute walk away.

Ok so I have to walk 25 minutes just to start the car. Then I can go where I want to - but if I bring anything back I'll have to find street parking in front of my apartment building to unload. Then I have to bring the car back to its spot, and then walk another 25 minutes back home.

Oh and don't forget to gas it up, because unlike owning a car, with a carshare more often than not you have to gas it up on the way back to avoid a penalty. You roll your eyes slightly at not just having to drop by the gas station but literally paying for the rental time to do it. But it's fine, whatever.

Like, I get that lots of people find this to be fine (I did, for over a decade!) - but it's anything but low-friction.

Traditional rentals are even worse - unlike carshares their pickup/dropoff locations are nowhere near you, so now you have to think about an Uber!

Where is the friction in owning the large truck? Paying for gas?? Finding parking?

(US-centric view.)

If you live in a major urban center, sure. Paying hundreds of dollars a month for a parking spot would quickly convince me that car ownership was a bad idea. Otherwise, at least in the US, cities spread out to make room for the habits of their inhabitants. There's going to be easy parking where you live because that's what all of your neighbors want.

Of course, I agree that you should just have the deliveries... but I'm not seeing this as an argument why. The costs are not great enough.

You’re paying considerably more all of the time – the vehicle is 2-3 times more expensive to buy, fuel costs are similar, every component will cost more to repair, and, yes, most buyers will have to worry about finding a parking spot on a regular basis. Insurance and, often, registration will cost more, too.

Now, if you’re in the 20% of truck buyers who really need them those are necessary costs but most people are buying them as a lifestyle accessory.

There’s also a fairly large group of people who live in urban settings who think they need all of that but are paying more than the cost of renting on the few times they actually do. Those people have been very good to the manufacturers’ profit margins but unfortunately all of the extra pollution and lowered safety affects their neighbors as well.

Trucks aren't 2-3 times more expensive to buy (at least in the US). A toyota camry (sedan) starts at ~$26k, and a tacoma (truck) starts at ~$32k.

That's the key people are missing, it's classic upselling. You're not comparing "nothing" to "truck" you're comparing "ok I get this vehicle that does X" to "or I get this other one that does X+Y".

This is the real reason the SUV has eaten everything, because the so-called "crossover SUVs" and other small ones are just fancy hatchbacks, and a car with a square butt will always be more useful than a similar sized car with a trunk.

The question was a large truck, but there’s also a complication here which might be fading with high interest rates: low rates, pandemic shortages, and improved wages meant a lot of buyers went upscale and that pushed the average truck sale price north of $60k, with a lot of luxury models in the $80k range. That’s what I had in mind for my comment.

I think gas and parking are good examples. If your truck has had 30% less fuel efficiency than a car, then you're going to spend 30% more of your time at the gas pump, huffing fumes, than a car owner for exactly the same outcome in terms of utilization.

Parking is similar. I can fit a small 2-door car into x% more parking spots in a city than a larger truck. So you can spend x% more of your time looking for parking spots. Maybe you're still looking for a spot when the car owner has already completed the errand.

As someone else mentioned, this friction is amortized over time so for some the psychological cost is lower, but for those who understand the principle of opportunity cost, it is a very real and tangible cost of ownership.

So address the fact that there are 4000 lb boxes doing 70 mph.

Physics, to a first order approx, doesn't care about the car mass, btw. It does care about A*Cd*v^3 though. Especially the v. A lot of problems depends on that v.

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