You Can't Ride in Your Own Self-Driving Car as Good as Uber or Lyft

[Wolf-R1]

Hell simply from the perspective that Americans love their luxury this will never pass on a larger scale. Customization options alone will kill this stupidity.

Of course this is probably an Uber idea since they are shady as f**k...

 

[nutzo]

But you don't have room for all those single house in major CA cities. Its physically impossible to do what you want, unless you want everyone to drive 2+ hours each way to the city. And the problem of cost in cities simply because there is too much demand, for too little housing. To help that, you need to approve more housing not less.

Life is about choices, if you want to live in popular cities, you must be willing to give things like yards. You want big yards, and cheap houses? Move to Detroit.

Except most of the reasons they are not building homes has little to do with a lack of space and more to do with NIMBY's and government regulations.
The high prices are due to scarcity, but also due to more government regulations.

Want to build homes on that large plot of land you own?
Better be willing to set aside half or more of the land as open space.
Then you will need to allocate at least 10% of the homes for low income buyers.
You also must pay prevailing wages (i.e. union wages). That law was passed last year and it's estimated it will add about $50,000 to the price of a 2,500 sqft home.
And who will pay for all this? The buyers of the new homes. This is how you get million dollar track homes.

The government talks about making homes more affordable, but do everything they can to cause the prices to go up.
Except for the small number of people who qualify for the subsidized low cost housing.
But even those people suffer in the long run. When they go to sell their price controlled home years later, they will not be allowed to sell at market rates and will lose out on the profits they otherwise would have received on a non-subsidized house.

We have large tacks of land, not pristine wilderness but old oil fields, yet when the owners try to build homes, they are sued and delayed for years. Many eventually give up, or accept such heavy restrictions, they only way they can make a profit is to build large million dollar homes on tiny lots.

 

[Todd Walter]

Not if the car owners can have their cars ferry people for them while they are not using it and keep 80% of the revenue while the company that runs the software keeps ~20%. Even if these numbers are dropped down a bit, you could get the best of both worlds... provided you do not mind having other people in your car. I do not think I would want to do this in a future tesla model 3 I want to get, but some second car for a household? Why not?

Because having to ride home in a car full of shit and puke from taxiing the afternoon drunks home would probably not be a fun experience? Not every passenger is a model citizen you know, just ask the public transit authority!

 

[lcpiper]

I need at least 8 more years until I can retire, but at the current rate California is being destroyed, I'm not sure I'll have that much time.
Both me and the wife are natives, and it's sad to see far this state is headed in the wrong direction.

I hope to sell my California track home for a million+, then move to another state and buy a nice place for 250k .
Would leave me with plenty for a nice retirement

(Where I live, a 2500 sqft home on a 6,000 sqft lot goes for around $850,000, and even 1,600 sqft single story home goes for over $700,000)

Same reason I always pass on jobs in CA, I have two homes in AZ paid for, I'd have to sell them both and would still have a mortgage, no way I'm doing that without enough years to work off the mortgage.

I'll remain Galadriel and diminish.

That doesn't really sound right ......

 

[dgz]

And that's exactly how they will do it. It's not that they will make their service so cheap, it's that they will push through laws that will make it too expensive to own a car.
(Think insurance with $5,000,000 liability coverage, mandatory yearly safety inspections, high registration and license costs, etc.)

Indeed. Just look at the PC industry and weep.

 

[Deleted member 134608]

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Uber doesn't own anything but marketshare. I'm sure Ford will sell them self-driving cars until the R&D investments are partly paid back and then launch their own Ford or Hertz branded self driving service and ownership options.

 

[tybert7]

Individuals will more than likely not own the vehicles. Fleet operators will, think uber, lyft, tesla, gm, etc.

Think of it this way: The cost of pay-per-mile will become so cheap, only the rich will own cars.

Tesla's idea of model 3 ferrying is simply an intermediate step to the end result

I don't think the market for personal cars will go away, at least not for homeowners. Being able to have your own transportation immediately is a nice perk, along with the amenities of nicer cars.

 

[travisty]

I don't think the market for personal cars will go away, at least not for homeowners. Being able to have your own transportation immediately is a nice perk, along with the amenities of nicer cars.

Here's the counter: Why have a vehicle which goes unused nearly 90% of the time, which costs money for maintenance, insurance, down payment, and loan payments / lease payments? When the alternative can arrive in 5 minutes and cost only how much you use it instead of huge expenditures up front/throughout the life of the vehicle.

TBH I doubt most will buy their own vehicles starting in about 5 years time. Sure they'll probably keep one parked in the garage for a while longer, but once the cars get on in age people will be re-purposing their garages - me? Probably some vertical gardening space.

 

[krotch]

Here's the counter: Why have a vehicle which goes unused nearly 90% of the time, which costs money for maintenance, insurance, down payment, and loan payments / lease payments? When the alternative can arrive in 5 minutes and cost only how much you use it instead of huge expenditures up front/throughout the life of the vehicle.

TBH I doubt most will buy their own vehicles starting in about 5 years time. Sure they'll probably keep one parked in the garage for a while longer, but once the cars get on in age people will be re-purposing their garages - me? Probably some vertical gardening space.

I think people would rather have their own cars and the added cost will be worth it to them. I own the vehicle and can do whatever I want with them. Have a better interior, louder stereo, etc. Also, it's not shared. I don't have to worry about someone throwing up, pooping, or whatever else happens in today's current taxis. I know how I left that car, is how I'll receive the car.

Of course, there's the convenience of having the car ready to go all the time. I'm not waiting for one to show up. Sure, you can probably schedule a car to show up, but what happens if one that's been messed up by the last customer shows up? Now I have to send it back and wait for another.

There's pros and cons for both, but I don't imagine much will change in 5 years, except in major cities. Even then, I imagine a large percentage in the suburbs of those cities will still opt to own their own car.

 

[SLee]

Here's the counter: Why have a vehicle which goes unused nearly 90% of the time, which costs money for maintenance, insurance, down payment, and loan payments / lease payments?

Why do people nowadays have expensive kitchens that they rarely use, or more bathrooms than people living in the house? It's because they can. If people cared only about the cost of cars, people buying new cars would be buying small econo-compacts. But cars, like houses and other big purchases aren't solely about costs.

And in reality, all maintenance, insurance, operating and capital costs will be paid by you in both cases. And even more so in the fleet services model because of the additional costs of deadhead miles. It doesn't really matter that your car isn't moving 90% of the time, because it's not incurring any real costs. Meanwhile, being heavily utilized, the fleet car reaches its end of life far quicker. The advantage of utilizing a car 9x as much is wiped out by having to replace the car many times quicker.

When the alternative can arrive in 5 minutes

What if it only arrives after 30 minutes because of demand, or because you're in a remote area, or because of congestion, or because you couldn't spot the car. It's easy to make up numbers when these services don't actually exist.

and cost only how much you use it instead of huge expenditures up front/throughout the life of the vehicle.

Right, because everybody pays all cash for their cars.

TBH I doubt most will buy their own vehicles starting in about 5 years time. Sure they'll probably keep one parked in the garage for a while longer, but once the cars get on in age people will be re-purposing their garages - me? Probably some vertical gardening space.

10 years after self-driving cars enter the market, I expect kids to no longer know what a taxi is, in much the same way kids today don't know what a payphone or landline is, because the advantages of a private line and phone that you can use whenever you want far outweigh the cheaper cost of shared phones.

 

[opfreak]

Here's the counter: Why have a vehicle which goes unused nearly 90% of the time, which costs money for maintenance, insurance, down payment, and loan payments / lease payments? When the alternative can arrive in 5 minutes and cost only how much you use it instead of huge expenditures up front/throughout the life of the vehicle.

TBH I doubt most will buy their own vehicles starting in about 5 years time. Sure they'll probably keep one parked in the garage for a while longer, but once the cars get on in age people will be re-purposing their garages - me? Probably some vertical gardening space.

Your math is misleading. Currently even with the down time average car ownership is 2x cheaper per mile then uber. per AAA its about 61cents per mile. Uber is about 2x that. Plus demand for cars isn't constant. Most cars get used during morning and night commutes.

 

[Uvaman2]

Your math is misleading. Currently even with the down time average car ownership is 2x cheaper per mile then uber. per AAA its about 61cents per mile. Uber is about 2x that. Plus demand for cars isn't constant. Most cars get used during morning and night commutes.

I agree. Thinking about it the thing that will kill uber and lyft will be a new app allowing car owners to let the car (autonomous) go and pickup people, the come back home for you. This would make you car a potential source of income for any owner. Im sure these companies see this too, and are getting in early with the fud and the bullshit.. i hope it doesn't work, ( their bullshit), and it shouldn't work. I agree with the previous poster, when it comes to insurance owners will remain liable as they are now, its the simplest most realistic outcome.. if autonomous cars really get into less accidents, then insurance might even be cheaper making car ownership even cheaper.

 

[Blakestr]

The singularity is near. There are so many change happening so quickly and there are all so interrelated - case in point - if delivery drones proliferate, why do I need to go out to the store to buy something when I can have 90% of the things I need delivered within the hour, and the other 10% in two days? Why do I need to go out when I can put on a VR headset and hang out with people that way. (Don't start on me about "kids these days", this is a technology forum). I'm not saying this will happen everywhere but it will happen to many places and will just be another complexity to factor in.

 

[Todd Walter]

The singularity is near. There are so many change happening so quickly and there are all so interrelated - case in point - if delivery drones proliferate, why do I need to go out to the store to buy something when I can have 90% of the things I need delivered within the hour, and the other 10% in two days? Why do I need to go out when I can put on a VR headset and hang out with people that way. (Don't start on me about "kids these days", this is a technology forum). I'm not saying this will happen everywhere but it will happen to many places and will just be another complexity to factor in.

We've ostensibly had the tech to telecommute since the '70s and yet there's been no sign of businesses not wanting asses in seats in sight. For all that big cities bitch about traffic, none have even tried to mandate a minimum number of offsite workers, despite the positive impact even a 15% reduction in commuter traffic would have. I don't think we're going to see a rapid change in lifestyle patterns quite as quickly as everyone seems to assume.