- A personal, individual vehicle which comes to pick you up where you are and take you to exactly where you want to go is a much MUCH higher value proposition than public transit.
- Add self-driving to the mix, and the cost of that service will plummet.
- When the car providing that service can drive itself, then there is little to no inconvenience to the vehicle owner to offer that service, and significant financial incentive.
- Because car owners will be able to make "rent" from their capital investment, owning a car will start to look more like property ownership than a depreciating investment-- especially as maintenance and operation costs fall for electric vehicles.
- There will be very strong financial incentive to use self-driving ride pools instead of putting up a large wad of cash to own a car. So total car ownership will go way down, and will be done much more by the wealthy and much less by the working/middle class.
- Cost of ownership is especially high in cities (parking), and the market for ride sharing is highest. So probably many fewer city dwellers will own cars.
- Families that own can shrink to one car instead of two, since the car can drop people off or pick them up.
I think there are a lot of pretty good reasons why the vehicle market is going to change significantly in the next 15 years.
Problems include:
- Cost. All of the (limited) Tesla automation technologies cost more than my last car.
- Liability. Who is liable for mishaps? As Uber has demonstrated accidents and traffic violations happen with automated tech.
- Utility. The majority of users aren't high income people in SFO and NYC. We have parking, getting picked up is cool, but not high ROI.
- Pool vs own. As we've seen with transportation services as varied as stagecoaches, cabs, railways, and airlines, service based transportation models aren't cheap. Service price is always demand driven, it will cost more when you need it.
- Owning a car in the US is one of the greatest values available in any market. I can be at any point in the CONUS in <3 days for under $500 with most cars.
I think self driving cars may put the bullet in some cabs for good after Uber and Lyft implode, and may bring train-like scale to intercity transit. But the fantasy being sold today is just that.
plus there will be additional benefits Safety: Less drunk drivers on the road, less accidents from fatigue, etc. Cost: at a minimum, it will bring cab prices down Efficiency: Less traffic jams as autonomous systems won't slam on the brakes when they see a police car, etc. Smoother flowing traffic, higher legal road speeds if reaction time is shorter
And then there are other non-car transport which will benefit: logicistics, mail, deliveries etc. Minibuses that could pick you up door to door through automated route planning etc.
Maybe there will be a stratified market for rental self-driving cars; one for "just this trip" and another for "five days of exclusive use for a road trip."
Cost is a short term problem. Costs will go down. Liabilities can be insured against.
Here is where I see it going:
Stage 1: Taxis start being replaced by self-driving vehicles at much lower cost. Car rentals too - liabilities potentially go down once they reach a certain level of safety as you don't face the risk of a poorer than average driver. Usage skyrockets as costs drop, and as services can cut pick-up times drastically by more optimally having a larger fleet parked around town and/or driving around town.
Stage 2: We start seeing pooling options from more and more rental providers to deal with high demand situations. E.g. Rental company crunches their numbers and see that my road => the local train station always maxes out capacity during rush hour and decides that rather than buying more vehicles, surge pricing coupled with offering a discount that brings the price back towards normal for each rider as long as it at most takes X minutes extra will be popular and more profitable.
Stage 3: They put in minibuses on some of the most congested streches and/or team up with the local bus companies to launch apps where you can tell them you're at the stop and get guaranteed pickup within Y minutes by either the regularly scheduled bus or a car. You pay a slight premium for the guarantee, which covers the car when the bus won't be there and a profit share with the bus company. (For me the only reason not to consistently use the bus is that if I need to be somewhere urgently, I can't always risk waiting for a bus that might be full; if I had a guarantee that if I press the button and walk to the bus stop, I will get picked up in 5 minutes, it'd make me use the bus more)
Stage 4: As self-drive increase in general, cities put the thumb on parking spots. E.g. in parts of London you already won't get planning consent for housing with more than 1.5 parking spaces per living unit as a means to cap car ownership. Expect to see that gradually driven down, with the expectation that people will buy parking space for their self-driven car elsewhere and/or forgo having one. Driving down the limits on parking will allow for denser developments, making ride share options etc. even more viable.
Stage 5: Youth grow up without depending on their parents to drive them anywhere from the moment they are trusted to go by themselves.
Basically, I see it as a process where the convenience of apps to get you somewhere will keep increasing to the point where people will find themselves increasingly opting to check these apps first and find themselves needing a car less and less. Some transport apps are already combining route-finding with then offering to order an Uber for you.
Expect to see more of that making it less attractive to get a car over time.
Especially as youth get used to a greater flexibility and level of freedom using these type of apps before they can buy a car. Car ownership many places represents freedom from parents driving you around, but more and more teenagers can expect to be in situations were parents opt to order them a car instead of driving themselves.
Before long, a whole generation will experience car ownership as irrelevant to the ability of liberating their transport options from parental control.
Sure, some people will still opt to own one, but many already forgo car ownership, and that number will certainly rise rapidly.
It does not matter if a car is selfdriving or not. To be recognized as available by someone means a utilization of about 30% by the providing company. But a utilization of about 30% does not drive down costs. You still of costs for producing and servicing the vehicle, which is way higher than just the energy costs.
Tesla has no experience in free floating vehilce fleets. Uber has no experience in such thing. ZipCar has. Car2Go has. Car2Go as an subsidary of Daimler even has experience in car production.
Now think of that.
1 - the zip cars available to me are a few blocks away to walk which isn't convenient if I'm carrying something or lazy.
2 - high cost. Taking uber right now is so much cheaper. Imagine if cars were self-driving. Costs would plummet
3 - parking. This can be very hard depending on where I'm going
4 - I have to pay for the length of time I'm out, not for my ride. I also need to return the car when I'm done.
These are the biggest pain points in my opinion. Also, not needing to drive myself is a huge bonus. The leverage of solving these pain points are huge, imo.
the bike shares solve this by driving trucks around, collecting bikes from areas where they aren't going to be needed and moving them to areas where demand is about to spike. it's hard to load up a truck full of cars to meet demand in the business district at 5pm, but it's very easy to send over all the spare capacity in your autonomous vehicle fleet.
Smoothing that out, so that you come to expect a car to be available very rapidly no matter what, with only minor inconveniences, may not end private car ownership but certainly will make a lot more people opt for alternatives - I know for myself (I don't own a car) the occasional lack of predictability in how soon I'll get picked up is the one aggravation that occasionally make me want one.
Comparing either of those or public transit to self driving cars misses the point entirely.
Self driving car networks basically can solve that.
But not necessarily shrinking the market. The cost of mobility goes down, consumption will go up. How high? I'm going to guess absurdly high. The reason US cities are sprawling messes is that they were built as the cost of mobility dropped off a cliff (cars and trucks replaced horses). Go read Clifford Simak's "City". People will live in self driving cars and commute in their sleep. It's going to be nuts.
If it's really self-driving it can go park wherever. Not very good for the environment, perhaps, but it completely solves that problem.
The end result is fewer cars owned by fewer people, but utilized much more fully, so the cars that do exist in cities spend more of their time driving and in-service, rather than sitting parked and empty for 98% of their lifetimes.
As someone who doesn't own a car, the only potential appeal to me of owning a car is shorter waits and predictability (always there). If the predictabiity and waits drop for rental services, my reasons for considering buying a car would rapidly drop. If the waits to use a car I own go up, my reasons for considering buying one would drop further.
It's like saying "I prefer my horse, I can feed it grass off the side of the road, but you have to find some fancy petro-chemical station for your auto-mobile? Insane! My gas grows next to the road!"
I get it, but try to put yourself in the place of someone younger who doesn't make decisions like "I would never replace my car because I keep spare diapers there!"
>If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market.
This is very Bill Gates "no one would ever need more than ..." argument. Come on!!
ZipCar has literally nothing on the future of mobility.
You (and many people your age, conditioned from birth to place massive value on personal car ownership) may never move past that paradigm. You might go to your grave in 50 years a proud owner of a vehicle in an era where almost no one owns.
I think, instead of sagely predicting failure, maybe try creativity, use that entrepreneurial mindset to solve future challenges.
You want to keep spare diapers nearby? Why not have a secure storage module in the vehicle, lets say the trunk can be split into 2 or 4 secure storage modules.
You order an autonomous electric vehicle to your location, ETA 5 minutes. You hit the "bring my secure storage container to my location" option, restricting the available pool of cars to meet your need to those close to your container, at a small additional fee.
Boom, the "insolvable" problem of personal storage in a vehicle is solved by commoditizing the storage and use the AI vehicle to transport it where you need.
I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried.
I doubt I'll last another 50 years, but I'll probably live long enough to see the end of the current robot taxi fad.
Cars have not been. The earliest proto-human sought shelter from a storm. They did not seek personalized shelter during transportation.
I don't like the argument at all, and I think it's a cop out, a slippery slope argument.
>Do you AirBnB your bed (at hourly rates)? Do you AirPantsAndT your clothes? Most people don't.
This is just a very feeble slippery slope that ignores the very real differences.
Yes, clothing and shelter have been humans needs for far longer than civilization itself.
Can you say the same for micro-space in a personal transport?
Were humans owning personal space inside of pack animals 10,000 years ago?
It's a bad argument. There's no slippery slope here. Homes and clothes are fundamentally different than cars.
You cannot live a civilized life without a home and clothes. You can live a civilized modern life without a car. Obviously we approach higher order needs differently than lower order.
> Cars have not been. The earliest proto-human sought shelter from a storm. They did not seek personalized shelter during transportation.
Are you familiar with New World Economics' discussion of "really narrow streets"? One thing the author points out (in "Let's Take a Trip to an American Village") is that even in the 19th century, the US was very interested in what he calls "My Personal Means of Transportation" -- the fashionable thing to do was to have a carriage house, no matter how little you actually needed a carriage. I think you see less of this pattern elsewhere in the world (or else you just see less wealth; consider how "pedestrian" seldom has positive connotations and "equestrian" never has negative ones), but there's definitely an enthusiasm for personal transport in the US.
The need for transportation is just as ancient as the need for shelter. Before cars, it was a horse, or camel, or a chariot, or something else on wheels.
I think you underestimate the strength of car culture, and the value people place in personal space (at least in the US).
And as with so many things, why can't these unnecessarily-competing worlds coexist?
There are millions of overly confident entrepreneurs rationalizing millions of wacky, over-engineered money-grabs and only a few of those ideas have strength to be so culturally and socially transformative as the world you describe. Is the end of car ownership one of those lofty ideas? I am not so sure.
Edit: and on a more personal level, I see ideas like that -- the end of ownership, whether it be cars, software, or land -- as an attack on individual ownership, so that moneyed interests can instead own everything and lease it to the peasants at their leisure (and profit). The world needs the opposite: to make ownership easier and less costly, and to restore the the increasingly-stratospheric costs of everything* down to levels that put ownership within reach of the common man. Not owning cars is just another step towards feudalism.
* As for how, there could be much to gain simply by analyzing the cost structure of stuff and stripping out unnecessary middlemen, expenses, and materials. Adopting a more restrained form of capitalism, like what one sees in tight-knit economic communities or in idealized small-business environments, could perhaps foster a business culture centered around balancing customer, employee, and shareholder value. The current system of only maximizing shareholder value creates much of the turmoil, unnecessary innovation, and naked profiteering we see today.
Yes, it's great to have personal space. But you know what? People sacrifice personal space for spending less money all the time. And for convenience.
Consider e.g. London - a city awash with money, where a lot of even people who could afford to be driven around by a personal chaffeur will opt for public transport for convenience.
As another example for London: People will opt to smell someones armpit on the train in the regular train carriages rather than pay a few pounds extra for a seat in the First Class carriages all the time. The value of personal space when travelling, as it turns out, is deemed by large parts of the public to be very low.
People tend to opt for personal space mainly when the public transit options are unusably bad compared to driving.
Places like London are perhaps the areas where this transition is most likely to start: Places where those who even own cars often own cars as a "contingency" for those times when the bus doesn't arrive or you're going somewhere odd that just doesn't work well with public transport currently.
In those cases, for a lot of people, it'd be very attractive to e.g. pay a membership fee to guarantee a certain level of "contention" for cars to be able to just press a button and have one arrive "fast enough". Even more so with the ability to do that on either end of a train ride. For a lot of people this will make a car pointless.
And in environments like this "personal space" is moot, as almost everyone are already used to using public transport some or most of the time.
At the same time, it is somewhere where local authorities are clamouring for ways to reduce parking and make car ownership less desirable. Expect housing units to start coming without parking spaces or with very few parking spaces in high density areas as cost saving measures, or because they'll sell some of those parking spaces to ride share companies, or make residents who want them buy them separately.
Expect planning rules to start reducing the maximum allowable number of parking spaces.
Places with plenty of space, sprawl and a strong culture of cars as independence will certainly experience this change last.
But consider e.g. the impact of a generation of youth who will eventually grow up with a situation where they may be able to rent a self-driving car on demand from before they are able to (afford to) buy one, and where e.g. parents may opt to just order a journey rather than driving them somewhere once old enough, and who will grow up increasingly likely to get used to some car taking them somewhere without needing to take the step to car ownership to get that freedom from parents driving them around. The "liberation" may become to be able to sign up for your own account so your parents can't see your every journey.
I think that the whole culture where car ownership is seen as a rite of passage and signifier of liberation from your parents could change far faster than you think.
Different people have different values. Also I'm quite young, so I don't think age is a strict delineation.
Self driving shuttle services will be a great new way to transport us, especially in metro areas, but this won't work very far from the center of those so if the valuation of that market is too optimistic in regards to Tesla the holders of their stock will pay for it.
If you look at the number of US car companies that have started from scratch in the past 70 years you don't see many still standing (pretty close to none). Tesla has a very different model though so we can't lump them in with most all of the others.
In my own humble opinion, I think Tesla's fate will be decided by how fast they can produce a low end, very affordable and dependable car for the masses. If they can deliver that within the next 3-4 years they've got a very good shot at moving up to competing with Ford and GM.
If they instead try to compete with higher end cars they'll find that's a hard road to travel. At some point soon the big players will produce a car that's a competitive option and dilute their market and they'll die.
It's worth remembering that both Honda and Toyota captured market here with affordable dependable cars, not luxury cars. Those came quite a few years later.
I fully expect Tesla will produce an affordable car though, and it would make perfect sense if they called it a "Model T".
Yes I did point out that most Americans and many people are conditioned from birth to value car ownership, even when it's a poor financial decision.
"Perfect example where Uber fails - I can't take my dog anywhere
As I told the other guy: Stop predicting failure based on problems, put on your creator and builder hat, and solve the problem.
Why not have pet friendly vehicles available at a small charge, guaranteed clean?
It bothers me that these problems are so easy to solve and yet people are so willing to write off a future possible technology without so much as thinking through any of the solutions.
Regarding the dog, I'm just pointing out something that currently doesn't work for me. Until they fix it I don't care - right now their solution does not help me and nobody has done anything to address it.
My point is simple. Right now owning a car is better than not owning a car for me. Until that changes I will want to own a car. If you don't want to own a car then good for you - different people have different desires.
A teenager doesn't just "want a car." He wants that freedom that car gives him... to go somewhere without bugging his parents or friends for a ride. If you're in a big city or someplace where this is not the norm, I could see you believing otherwise.
(And I laughed at "guaranteed clean." Right. All that means is you get a refund when you find the dog turd in the back seat.)
Precisely, and this is why owning the car isn't that important. This teenager presumably still has to pay for the car and fuel, or bug his parents for it. Paying for the (cheaper) self driving ride is no different.
It is different. If you're relying on someone (or something) else, waiting around, you're not "independent."
Really, this doesn't seem like much of a stretch.
You might have noticed that people are hoarding a lot of stuff, that are of little value to them. It's probably an intrinsic value to most people to own things. It might vary a little between cultures, but it seems to be a common trait.
If you don't - great for you.
However. It might happen that you one day walk by a car on display in a mall, and notices the nice paint, a practical laptop holder, the particularly nice storage boxes for diapers and what not, and thinks to yourself - "I want that car."
And I was just pointing out that your personal experiences with today's ride sharing aren't relevant to a hypothetical discussion of an unrelated future transport technology.
I'm defensive because you're continually derailing a thread about futuretech to list your personal experiences with todaytech. I don't get why you derail this conversation to make it emotional and personal, so I get defensive about the track of the conversation of solving tomorrow's problems. Stop taking it personally, think bigger! Solve a problem!
I literally did share a solution in this post, and the one before.
- Commoditize storage and transport it to you on demand
- Offer pet friendly cars
Boom. Solved.
As I also wrote: "I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried."
Is this hackernews, where builders come to talk about exciting ways they're solving tomorrow's problems?
Am I on the wrong site?
You haven't solved anything until you've demonstrated a working solution. If it were so easy to fix problems in the real world, politicians would have our economy constantly booming, there would be more jobs than people, and the Middle East would be the most peaceful place on Earth.
Anyway, I don't think we're going to agree on anything. I'm exiting this thread.
By the same standard uber as a whole is not a working solution.
Why must some people see new inventions always as colossal destroyers of products they don't like instead of the more humble 'enriching ones freedom to choose'?
If self-driving cars has as massive an impact on car ownership as e-books have had on the paper book market, that will be a dramatically noticeable change in most cities.
I know many people who keep golf clubs in their car because sometimes a salesman is looking to round out a 4-some. I like going to walmart/lowes... over lunch and leaving my treasures in my car.
Car sharing won't actually work out anyway because everyone needs their car during rush hour. Everyone is driving then anyway, and then the cars sit idle.
For example: Mom takes service to work, possibly carpooling. Dad takes uses family car to drop off kids and goes to work. Car drives itself to mom's work for her to use to pick up kids and commute home. Dad takes service home. Or whatever. The point is kids can always be in the car with the extra diapers, with safety features parents want, etc.
The other part of this that people ignore is that a car sharing service could open up a lot of flexibility. For example, maybe our dedicated family car is just a sedan, but on this particular weekend with the grandparents in town, we can use the car sharing service to get a minivan and have everyone ride together. Or I want to pick up a piece of furniture and request a truck from the service. Or it's my anniversary, and I can request a luxury sedan to drive us to the restaurant for a touch of opulence. I'm sure there are many other examples people can think of.
Like you say, car sharing won't cover everyone's need, especially at first, but eventually, the big players in the space will have enough sophistication to cover many cases, especially for a second car.
Car sharing starts to make sense when you want the car outside of rush hour. Want to go to the store for an hour at 2:30, no problem there are plenty of cars free. Want to get to work every day - you are paying peak rates for a car that will probably be used exactly twice that day, once to get you to work and once to get you home.
(This assumes that you're also from the US, for rhetorical convenience.)
At this point in time, I think it's wise to avoid laying costly new tracks with the dawn of driverless cars on the horizon.
In fact, this is a perfect use case for driverless cars. The problem with trains everywhere is the wasted time not on the train and the million stops along the way.
It gives us exactingly detailed information on what journeys people need. The dataset will be immensely valuable in allowing the companies that sit on them to first start doing quasi-bus services:
Order a bunch of minibuses. During peak hours, offer an option: Wait for the next dedicated car to be free, or ride share with quicker availability and a discount. Limit detours strictly - there'll be plenty of "Follow road X and pick up 6 people on the way to station Y" type stretches that will make people happy (little time lost; feels efficient if there's not lots of turning off).
Then you can see them partnering with bus providers to dynamically fill in during peak hours, or even bidding for bus franchises and proposing contract changes that would allow for more dynamic, demand-based scheduling.
Ultimately this can feed into planning train type services - companies offering these type of drive share will be able to e.g. let people order "end to end" journeys of the type "pick me up at address 1, get me to address 2" where they show journey options that include rail when it makes sense. The key beying that if they do so, they will know the entire desired journey, and would be able to offer insight into the most efficient interchange locations or other changes to train services would be most desirable.
The raving reviews you'd get the first times people order a car and are told instantly "your car is already waiting right outside your door" would be rather interesting.
Get in, and your favorite radio station or music is playing.
And for colder climates: Your car is already pre-heated. I remember too many winter mornings during winter in Norway when even ensuring our car would actually start in the morning was an annoyance (even with a garage, space heaters in the garage or motor heaters is sometimes necessary).
Yes they will; the magic trains you're thinking of are called streetcars. And, with the oddities in oil and the difficulties of maintaining suburbia, we'll be moving back to dense streetcar suburbs soon enough.
We still have typewriters around too, and some people ride horses. Old tech doesn't die, it just diminishes to a smaller niche.
Car seats will be a bigger problem: they are unwieldy, legally mandated, and require careful installation to be effective. Unlike diapers, even the small boosters used for older children can't fit in a shoulder bag.
A young couple expecting to have children in the next few years might balk at these inconveniences, and that could depress adoption of the 'mobility' model. You have to keep prospective purchasers in mind, who are evaluating their needs over the use-life of a car.
Maybe poor people will take the robocab from hell, with sick on the floor. Most people will not.
The difference being that poor people will have the "robocab from hell" alternative rather than have nothing they can afford, and that more people will afford said high end sedan when it's self-driving, and will be able to justify it more often, and more people will afford to trade up to even more luxurious services.
There is already a marked class difference in commuting in London: Low paid people take the bus four two hours+ for commutes that'd take less than half that if they could afford the train from the outer fare zones (bus-rides cost the same within the entire London fares area), so transport is already today segregated by income. A lot of the longer bus lines makes no apparent sense until you realise that low paid people often can't afford the train, or a car.
What does this even mean? People like to leave stuff in their cars (e.g. mug, gym bag). They like them to be at their preferred level of cleanliness or disorder. Some even use them as a means of personal expression.
If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market.