The average household in the US has about 2.1 cars. Makes sense. Most adults in the country each have a car that they use to transport them selves to and from work, transporting kids, running errands, etc. etc. However your car is also probably your least utilized asset you own. It is currently estimated that personal cars are only utilized about 4% of the time that you own it. It sits in the parking lot at your employer while you work all day. It sits in your garage or driveway while you are at home eating, watching TV and sleeping.
But if you and the other drivers in your household had slightly different schedules, such that an autonomous car would make sense, would you consider reducing the number of cars in your household?
You leave for the office at 7:00 am and arrive there at 7:30. You send the car back home where your spouse can use it throughout the day or use it to take them to their job. The car can be called back to your office as you need it, or sent to the school to pick up the kids and take them to basketball practice, and come to pick you up later.
Increasing the utilization of your car would seem practical. It would likely mean that you would need to purchase a new one sooner, but you would also only need one car to begin with instead of two.
Would this be appealing to you and your family?
Mostly curious about the psychology of consumers in this area.
Not in the slightest, I enjoy driving, I have never even owned a vehicle with a sludgebox transmission, so why would I want the utter boredom and tedium of a SDC, plus, as a computer tech, I KNOW how unreliable computers can be, do we really want that technology driving us around?
The only possible use I can see for a SDC is for older/elderly people who are no longer able to drive themselves, a SDC would give them back their freedom they had during their driving days
I am not a communist in any sense of the word and never plan to be (that includes girlfriends, spouses or anyone for that matter). Nobody but me drives my vehicles and I use them for a lot more than basic transportation. For example, in my current SUV, I have every piece of recreational equipment I would want to use in the back ranging from an inflatable boat to a basketball, tennis equipment, a fishing rod and even survival gear. I like using it any time the opportunity arises including on my lunch break.
I love driving, hate other people messing with my stuff and am practically allergic to public transportation (shared cars are still public transportation in my mind). I want a great sound system programmed just the way I want it and a stash of some of my favorite books and magazines stored neatly so that I have access to them any time I am bored. All of that is incompatible with a shared vehicle. My iPhone just won’t cut it.
In short, not no but hell no. It sounds great if everyone else does it because it will free up a bunch of parking spaces but I will be keeping it personal and private. Can you even tell an autonomous car that you want to stop beside the road to pee or just cruise the strip to see what is going on? If not, those are some other huge drawbacks.
Nah. I like having my own car. And having a car where I am when I need it (If I go out to lunch or run an errand during the day). One of the reasons I hate and don’t use public transportation is having to wait for it (along with the inconvenience of course).
And if either my Wife or I are away from home, the other still needs a car. Wouldn’t work at all for us.
Seems to me it would be easy for someone who didn’t like you and knew their way around computers to hack your system and send your car barreling into oncoming traffic at 65 mph.
I’ve got a pretty plausible family situation for just one vehicle, provided it’s an SDC. I could see doing that. We have two now, but need both simultaneously just a couple hours a week at most. We’ve already tried to war-game having just one ordinary car but some of our corner cases are cornery enough it won’t quite work. Those problems would be solved if the car was an SDC.
But … assuming SDCs’ purchase price and cost per mile are the same as conventional cars, I’m not sure it actually makes sense financially.
IOW, in my case it’d be logistically feasible but might be more costly. I’d save on one purchase price and insurance on the second vehicle, but put an extra 6-8000 miles a year shuttling the car around.
Finally, even if the costs do come out somewhat in favor of the single SDC, I might still be glad to spend an extra couple thou a year to have two vehicles just for the redundancy. One or both might be SDCs.
I’ve pooh-pooh-ed the idea of large scale ridesharing in any number of SDC threads. Until / unless we change the times of day 90% of people work, we’re still going to need the same number of cars clogging the freeways each morning and evening. Traffic might flow more efficiently, but the idea that since conventional privately owned cars have 4% utilization now we could all change to hired-by-the-trip SDCs and bump that to 75% utilization and use 1/20th the total vehicles is nonsense.
In some situations, especially if everything is short commutes, it would be great.
It would not work for me, it would cost more, if i had the situation you describe.
For the car to take me to work, and go home again to do something else, means the car
drives 4 hours, then another 4 round trip to come get me again.
That does not leave the car much time to do other trips, and as you can see would horribly double the fuel cost and mileage.
It would actually more than double the fuel cost as i normally use a motorcycle, i rarely ever get inside a car, i have rain gear, and like getting near 60mpg
I had an autonomous car in China for five years (the control mechanism was a Chinese man I called “my driver” [actually, “Mr. Zhou”]). I’m not trying to be funny here, but it’s kind of the same thing from the perspective of the user.
There were about 100 of us foreigners at the peak, most of us were there with our families (spouses, children, pets), and we were all limited to having a single company car, and it was a PITA. In my scenario, it should be noted that the vast majority of spouses didn’t work while we were in China, but a lot of kids had to get back and forth to school and to their activities.
Work hours were erratic because we had either to come in early or get a late start because of family use of the car. In many cases, we had to borrow each other’s cars throughout the day because the owner’s car was off on some family errand. My boss missed a flight one time because his car wasn’t able to return to work in time to get him to the airport (and my car was off on some other duty).
And fuel is expensive in China. The multiple trips per day, back and forth, were expensive and probably contributed heftily to Nanjing’s smog problem.
Sharing a single, autonomous car is definitely not something I envision in my future.
To maximize utility of self-driving cars, ownership is the wrong paradigm for use. Because in a family of 4 people and 2.1 cars, odds are that the two cars will be needed during the same time a decent portion of the time – like during commuting hours.
The far more logical thing would be to have, say, 500 self-driving cars shared among a couple thousand people, and manage high use times through pricing. So in comparison, under the ownership model, I pay 100% of the cost of using the car 4% of the time (or whatever). In a sharing model, I’d pay some fraction – maybe 4%, 10%, or even 25% – of the cost to use the shared car 4% of the time.
Would I want to cut my transportation expenses by, say, $300 a month with the only trade-off of not keeping my shit in my car all the time? Hell, yes.
ETA: but again, this system would be worth it to the extent that there is a large enough pool of shared car users to support a rather large fleet of self-driving cars. It just wouldn’t scale down to family-size units.
Engines do pretty good when you keep them running. Cold-starts are the thing that causes a lot of the wear: pistons/rings don’t seal well because they’re not up to full operating temp, and (for port-injected gasoline engines) there’s a lot of liquid fuel splashing onto the cylinder walls, compromising lubrication. If Random Joe runs his engine 5-10 miles between cold starts, the pistons/rings/cylinders are going to have significant wear by the time he accumulates 100,000 miles (10,000-20,000 cold-starts); he should expect some oil consumption. OTOH, if a taxi driver runs his engine 100 miles between starts, then by the time he hits 100K miles (1000 cold-starts), his engine is still going to be very healthy. As the Jalopnik article indicates, the engine can be healthy for several hundred thousand miles.
Not sure what happens for a single family sharing a SDC. The utilization surely won’t be 75%; if one driver results in 4% utilization, then a DINK couple sharing one SDC might expect 8% utilization. If the engine is still warm/hot when the second user gets into it, then that’s not really a true cold-start, so the engine is better off for it. I don’t think they should expect 500K miles out of it, but at 100,000 miles, the engine will likely be in better shape than it would with a single driver; they’d be more willing to keep the car for 200,000 miles or more.
Similarly, many people park their cars outside, where the sun takes its toll on paint and upholstery based on calendar time, not utilization. In many parts of the country, salty winter roads also chew up the body. An SDC with >8% utilization will be in better shape at 100,000 miles than a conventional car with 4% utilization.
Bottom line, a well-utilized SDC would not get worn out in 18 months; I would still expect it to be in good shape for many years. In addition, if you only have one car, you free up space in your garage for other junk, like bicycles, motorcycles, and a garage band. Or if you pay for parking, then you pay for less parking. Or you can get by in a house with a single-car garage.
Heck, self driving cars don’t even seem necessary. Seems like a workable business model for Uber or Lyft would be to offer a subscription service. Pay X amount of dollars per month for X amount of miles.
The expense of the guy who drives the car radically alters the value proposition. Let’s just say the total operations cost of a car is $1,000 a month for 24/7 availability. The cost of the meat puppets behind the wheel is going to be many thousands of dollars more than that.
Uber and Lyft don’t pay their drivers an hourly wage. They work off of commission. So I’m not seeing how it is costing them anymore than it is now.
So if they offer a subscription service, say the user signs a one year contract, Uber gets a guaranteed revenue for one year, Uber drivers still get their commission (on their end, they don’t even need to know they’re picking up a subscriber. It’s all the same to them.), and the user gets a fixed rate for the duration of the contract.
Admittedly, I don’t know if that model would generate any more revenue for the company than their current model.
Self-driving cars and car sharing don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. Plenty of people already use car sharing services, especially those in congested cities, where parking is hard to find and expensive, and a car is needed only infrequently. Most of the time, you use public transit, walk or use a taxicab. But once a week or so, you need to make a major shopping trip to Costco or IKEA or perhaps you want to visit a friend in the suburbs who is nowhere near a commuter rail station, so perhaps you use a car sharing service then.
On the other hand, if you live way out in the boondocks, perhaps you would like a self-driving car to drive you to work. So even if you never share the self-driving car with anyone, you appreciate having it.
The reason I broke the question down into operations costs versus human costs is to highlight that a self-driving car has an economic advantage in the lack of much of the human cost (beyond maintenance, etc).
No matter how a rideshare driver gets compensated – salary, hourly, commission, in-kind, finding recycling by the side of the road – the absence of the need to pay drivers at all is a very substantial cost savings to the consumer. The cost of the driver is always built in to the cost to consumer, regardless of how the compensation is structured. Remove the cost of the driver, and the cost to the consumer goes down substantially.