Re:Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commerci...
by 542354234235 on Friday September 19, 2025 @08:06AM
(#45300673)
>This assumes the occasional need for a car
40% of US households have two cars, and more than 20% have three or more [1]. As a two-car household that was able to go down to one after moving to where I could bike to work, I would say your assumption is too binary.
[1] https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
Re:Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commerci...
by tgsovlerkhgsel on Friday September 19, 2025 @09:23AM
(#45301413)
The thread started out as Europeans being sad about missing out on driverless cars. In e.g. Berlin, about half the households have zero cars.
If you need a car on at least a weekly basis, you're probably going to have your own car either way (unless the self driving car services are really good and cheap).
But even if all everyday trips don't require a car, it's very likely there will be some exceptions. And those can make or break this. If getting a car for that occasion requires hours of overhead (e.g. getting to a pick up/drop off point), is sufficiently inflexible (cars not reliably available on short notice), or prohibitively expensive (e.g. per-km charges on car sharing cars that make a couple longer day trips per year more expensive than just getting a cheap car), people who otherwise could do without a car will consider getting one.
OTOH, if the alternative is really good, people who occasionally need a car might use a service rather than owning a car, which means usage-based cost i.e. a much bigger incentive to pick alternatives. If they have been pushed to own a car, the fixed costs are a sunk cost and the marginal cost of taking car can easily be cheaper than public transit.