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Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

This is silly. Key points:

- Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars. If people share cars, we only need one car per five or ten people. NYC has only 13,000 taxis for eight million people.

- Having cars drive around in circles wastes lots of expensive gasoline, which someone has to pay for. If gas is $4/gal., the car gets 20 mpg and it drives at 60 mph, we're talking $12 per hour, or $150 to drive around all night.

- Right now, there is nothing illegal, or even difficult, about renting a van, driving out to the middle of nowhere and living in it. Almost no one does so, because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Where would you shower, cook, do laundry, etc.?

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I'm a fan of driverless cars but I enjoyed 'jellicle's take. Applied in their most selfish mode, driverless cars could really suck.

Sharing cars might work for people currently using taxis, but 1) why aren't they using taxis right now already, and 2) there are things people like having in their own car. Car seats are a big example for families. And LATCH doesn't work anywhere near as good as it does on paper.

Re taxis, right now you have to pay for the human driver's wages, and for the driver's medallion. This makes taxis much more expensive.

Re car seats, obviously if there's a lot of demand for them, driverless car companies will pre-install them on some of their fleet.

This is a bit of a tangent, but also, Selfishness Does Not Work Like That. When you look at a totally "selfish" part of the economy (eg. consumer electronics, or sports cars), it often works beautifully efficiently - every year, we get better stuff for less money. When you look at "selfless" parts (eg. education, health care), they are often giant clusterfucks. Are there exceptions? Certainly. But one can hardly say it's axiomatic that "selfishness" = "bad".

(Re healthcare, yes, in America it's unusually bad, but in Germany/Canada/Switzerland/etc. the price we pay per suffering alleviated still keeps going up and up and up.)

Having a driverless car pull up with a child seat littered with food in various states of digestion and other bodily fluids is not my idea of the future.

Considering some adults can be more unsanitary than children, it seems we may also need a way to automate the cleaning of interiors.

Yup. Unfortunately, easily cleanable interiors are not generally compatible with attractive luxury interiors. Why do taxis have plasticy seats? Because it's easy to clean them.

> Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars.

Why would you think an invention that makes cars better would reduce the demand for cars?

I don't think he said it would reduce the demand for cars, instead his theory is that it would reduce the demand for individual ownership of cars. The demand would probably increase, but be serviced by fewer cars because of more efficient use.

Why, the same way that increased fuel efficiency doesn't affect the number of miles people drive! ;)

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