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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea.

The doomerism surrounding this topic is wild.

Gas prices have also gone up recently, but I don't see the same claims about how it's the end of personal vehicles, that the prices are never coming down, or that we're all becoming renters instead of buyers.

Saying that there isn't a force countering this is peak doomerism. New factories take a long time to build. These companies didn't have spare production lines waiting for demand to go up.

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If you don't see people talking about the "end of personal vehicles", it could just be that you haven't looked very hard.

It's intuitively obvious to a lot of people that the era of personal, wholly owned transportation is waning. A lot of people seem to miss the second clause of that old "you'll own nothing" phase, the part where most people are happy about it!

When vehicles drive themselves, and there's a large enough pool that one can show up pretty reliably within a few minutes of your needing one, how many people are going to choose to own when renting is cheaper and easier?

Because renting will likely never be cheaper. Maybe the occasional city dweller may see a profit, but those of us who spend hours in our cars each day will not.

Perhaps additional financial incentives for people to not spend hours of their day in cars is a good thing?

Probably everyone that doesn't live in a dense metropolitan area, and anyone that can do the math that "Owning my vehicle for 100,000 miles costs an average of $0.50/mile compared to the $1+/mile getting a lift costs, and once it's done I still have whatever value remains in my vehicle"

If this was really an economically viable plan, we’d all just take taxis everywhere.

And some do. Most don’t, for the same reasons self driving doesn’t matter.

It wasn't economically viable 20 years ago.

What about 20 years in the future?

It’ll be outcompeted by flying cars of course.

> If you don't see people talking about the "end of personal vehicles", it could just be that you haven't looked very hard.

Or it could be that I mostly talk to people in the real world, and less so follow the echo chambers online that think "you'll own nothing" is a foregone conclusion about the future and fit their worldview to match.

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