Especially once more people start doing this the profit margins will go down quickly.

I am also a bit skeptical, but then again I would have said a similar thing about the entire concept of UberX/Lyft in 2010.

People are already successfully renting out Porsches and Teslas on Turo in my city at over a hundred dollars a day (and with 5 day minimums!).

If you give me $500 you can puke in my car all you want. And I'm relatively well-off and don't need the money, imagine someone struggling to make the payments like most Americans.

People also rent out their homes on AirBnB. Yet we don’t live in a world where most people buy a primary home they can’t afford with the intention that they will just rent it out to offset the mortgage a bit. The closest we get is people getting roommates for an apartment.

Agreed -- this seems like a terrible plan. Taxis are designed to be durable more than comfortable, have drivers to constrain rider misbehavior, and generally have fares ride in back, and they still get nasty. If I wanted my car to serve as an unsupervised taxi, it would have to be durable inside, I could never leave any personal belongings in it (e.g. gym bag, sunglasses, recent purchases), and I would have to get it seriously cleaned on a regular basis. That would dramatically increase the cost and/or decrease the value of ownership.

Just look at bikes: either you hire/"share" a 40-pound tank that sucks to ride, rent something decent with a substantial deposit, or buy a nice bike that you would never loan out to random strangers.

Public transportation is a great thing, but it is fundamentally different from private vehicles.

And yet Uber and Lyft are monumentally successful, which is the exact same thing, but with a driver.

Uber and Lyft are "monumentally successful" (while still hemorrhaging money and, in one case, flirting with being sued out of existence) because people are bad at math. People are much better at noticing that their stuff gets trashed. Don't underestimate the importance of "with a driver."

Okay but if your argument is that "people won't sign up for it", you are clearly wrong. Regardless of the financial success of those companies, they are everywhere in just about every major city and even most suburban areas in the US.

Throw a streaming camera in the car, and require a credit card on file, and they can trash the inside of my car all they want, they are just paying for the cleaning or new interior.

People won't stay signed up for it for very long.

> Throw a streaming camera in the car, and require a credit card on file, and they can trash the inside of my car all they want, they are just paying for the cleaning or new interior.

You might want to think this one through a bit more carefully. One dude hides a joint in his back pocket, and now your car smells like weed. Another accidentally sat on a piece of gum earlier, and now part of it is stuck to your seat. When do you notice? How do you decide who is at fault, or when to start a credit card dispute? You will have a dozen random people using your car every day, very few malicious, but none with any interest in taking care of it beyond not trashing it. Taking care of "your" car will become a full-time job.

EDIT (slow-ban reply): Fair enough. Plenty of people have rental properties. I think it seems like an enormous hassle, but it can apparently be a decent living or side-hustle, so I could be wrong about cars.

And again every single one of those scenarios happens every day with uber and lyft, and they still have a massive number of drivers working for the service every day.

I don't really want to get into an internet argument on the details of how uber and lyft work, but most of those things are easily solvable right now in-app with the click of a button, and I've personally seen the "difficulty" of having to take a few photos of what the last rider did to your car, upload it in-app, and have the company pay for repairs/cleaning in the span of a day or 2.

None of this is "impossible" to solve, and I could absolutely see the future of cars being less of "this is my car" and more of "i'm buying this as an investment" similar to how some people buy and rent housing, especially 50 or 100 years from now.

FYI you can (almost) always get around the "slow reply" limitation by clicking on the age of the comment which brings you to a new page where you can normally comment.

Although I believe the moderation is more strict for comments that do that, as the whole point of the reply throttling is to prevent low-effort angry replies.

Think it’s that easy? Good luck, if they don’t pay then maybe go through your insurance, which is a lot higher too because you need special insurance since you use your car for commercial purposes.

I don't actually think it's that easy, and I would most likely not ever do something like that, but I think it's ridiculous to imply that nobody would sign up for such a service, hell the fact that over 2/3s of my friends in college were driving for uber and lyft on their off-time, a few of them actually bought newer cars just so they could Uber/Lyft and easily made the difference back.

Still, even without the "general population ridesharing" aspect, I'd love to "rent out" my car to friends and family. Between myself and my wife, we really don't need 2 cars, but we have 2 because there are some semi-rare instances where we both need to be somewhere different. The amount of time that we both need to be somewhere different at exactly the same time is even more rare.

If we had a self-driving car capable of taxiing us around, it would allow us to drop down to 1 car instead of 2, meaning it can be quite a bit more expensive and still save us money.

Turo (fka RelayRides) has been successful at doing exactly this. Airbnb has also shown people's willingness to share personal spaces to offset their mortgage or rent.

Yea? And how do you know these platforms haven’t already peaked? If so many people are willing to rent out space why isn’t damn near every house on AirBnB? There is nothing to support the idea that a few people being willing to rent out space means a much larger class of consumers is willing to do so.

If that is your position, it's quite different from your initial statement that GP had to be "incredibly out of touch".

There are multiple, billion dollar companies where users rent out large, personal assets to others. I don't see that as "nothing to support the idea". It's direct evidence that people are willing to do it at a reasonable level of scale.

I'm not sure what level of scale you're thinking or what you're responding to at this point. If you can scale back a bit on the hyperbole and adversarial mindset, I'm interested to discuss.

The notion that people are so desperate for an expensive Tesla that they will buy it and then happily rent it out to help pay for the cost is out of touch. People have other options, people value keeping their private property private, and people will certainly just wait for when they can buy a cheaper used Tesla, just like any other car.

It is interesting to consider how much fully autonomy will impact attitudes toward private property. I agree it's a stretch to assume most potential buyers are willing to rent their car out as an autonomous vehicle to offset the cost.

However I do think that % of people will be higher than it is today because full autonomy creates more situations where you've bought an expensive asset which sits idle throughout most of the day when you're working or sleeping.

Elon's assuming that Tesla will be the first to market with Level 5 autonomy. If that's the case, people will be willing to pay a huge premium to get one, especially if they think they can offset the costs by having it "pay for itself while you sleep".

People over whom you have social interaction- neighbors, work peers and so forth- are on better behavior than arbitrary strangers.

This isn't a solid rule by any means, but I think most people with experience in retail know what I'm talking about... if someone thinks they're never going to see you again, they will behave very differently, and never for the better. There is a HUGE difference between your peers, neighbors, and "fellow humans".

OTOH, Airbnb and VRBO make pretty compelling arguments the other direction; I suspect this is at least partly due to security deposits and the reputation systems where owners can leave feedback about renters.

I did my stint in retail and know exactly what you’re talking about. Thank god I escaped and lived happily ever after.