Is private car ownership about to disappear?

Great Debates
41

This, absolutely. But there are even bigger reasons why most people will want to continue owning their owns cars rather than rapidly switching through multiple cars owned by a corporation.

My wife’s job requires her to lug a lot of stuff around as she visits nursing homes, hospitals, and homes. It would be major pain in the ass if she had to transfer all that stuff from one car to another every day or two. In addition to transportation, cars are auxiliary storage space for all kinds of stuff and people would not be willing to give that up.

Or try having a baby. When you have one, you need to have a car seat in the back and most likely you’re carrying a diaper bag and a bunch of toys and spare clothes with you wherever you go. Which means that you don’t want to be constantly moving that stuff from one car to another.

People use their cars for all kinds of tasks in addition to transportation, and they personalize cars to their needs and tastes. And that’s not possible if you’re doing short term leases and changing cars constantly.

42

Imagine I gave you a personal chauffeur for each car that you own (lets just say in this hypothetical you have 2 cars in your household, so you now have 2 chauffeurs). Each of these chauffeurs are on-call 24/7, take up zero room in your car, never need to take bathroom breaks, and you never have to pay them.

Its probably not going to take long before you start saying to yourself: “Well, i have TWO of these guys, and each of them are just sitting around 21 hours a day doing absolutely nothing at predictable times (parked at home, parked at work, parked at the grocery store), waiting for me or my family to need them. How about I tell one of them to go find a job working for Uber when I’m not using it? Sure, it’s a bunch more wear and tear on my car, and I’d have to pay $20/day to get it cleaned, but it’s 21 hours a day in free labor! Even at minimum wage, that’s like $1300/week! In fact, I’d like to have bothof them getting jobs at Uber, but I don’t want to risk them both being across town when I need a ride now, so I’ll keep one dedicated for me, for now.”

Now picture all the cars parked in your neighborhood (in garages and on the street). Picture all the cars parked at the grocery store, and at the parking lot where you work, also sitting around unused for 21 hours a day. Imagine each one of them has also been granted it’s own personal chauffeur. All those owners have also done the math, and realized that they’re missing out on 21 hours of free Uber money a day, so they all make the same decision as you and keep half of their cars personally dedicated to themselves, and half to Uber.

Now your entire town has an absolutely enormous influx of Uber rides available. Fully half the cars in every single parking lot, and in every single household garage are just sitting around waiting for someone to hail a ride. How many seconds do you think it would take you to get an Uber in these conditions, maybe 10 or less?

So now you’ve realized that with a 10 second Uber wait time anywhere you are, there’s no point retaining your other chauffeur. You have that one get a job at Uber too, this time for 24 hours a day (another $1500/week!). You don’t even have it park at home anymore, what’s the point? You convert your garage to a home theater.

All your neighbors now do the same. With so much supply of free labor, and so little demand, Uber ride prices plummet, and settle on barely more than the upkeep/gas on the car. With so many cars still sitting around doing nothing but wait for rides, and the huge profit incentive gone, nobody is making money in Uber anymore other than large companies that can afford to make razor-thin profit margins. But Uber prices are still ridiculously cheap, so everyone still uses it, and people just make the rational choice to start dumping their cars one by one, until supply and demand re stabilize.

With no purpose, more than 75% of the car population eventually disappears. Home garages sit empty, parking lots are barren. Sure, people still have personal cars, but it’s no longer cost-effective or more convenient to do so. Uber is still dirt cheap, and wait times are negligible.

43

What do I care if society is able to use cars 40%* more efficiently if I take taxis all the time? I want my own car that I don’t have to share with the planet. I’m extremely confident car companies will be happy to sell it to me (though I’m somewhat less confident they’ll offer it at a price I like).

  • I don’t believe that a fleet of self-driving car would all be in use 75% of the time. 100% of them will be on the roads during rush hour and that number will drop to 50% during the rest of the day and 10% at night. (Figures pulled from my butt but the model seems plausible enough to dispute a 75% butt-sourced number.)

Another thing I’ve noticed in this thread is a tendency to assume that because some people will like a new model, that all people will. In a thread about whether the old model will disappear, that matters. I was amused to read about how cell phones had eradicated land lines, for example - I have a land line. They still exist alongside cell phones for people who prefer them. I’m absolutely certain that privately owned cars will function the same way, except moreso. It can reasonably argued that everybody could function pretty well if land lines went away and only cell phones existed. If privately owned cars went away then large numbers of people in rural or semirural areas would be screwed.

As for the notion that the safety of autonomous cars would render manual driving illegal due to being too unsafe, you guys do realize that autonomous cars make manual driving safer too, right? The same systems that will watch out for toddlers in the street will also watch out for manually driven cars in the street. A road that’s 99% autonomous will seem like heaven for reckless drivers; everyone else will be getting out of their way. And then they’ll get pulled over and fined into oblivion of course - but that only applies to overtly reckless drivers. Decent drivers will have all the advantages of a road of autonomous cars along with their own natural habits of good driving; they’ll probably do just fine.

44

I have never used an Uber, and barring some sort of dire emergency, I never will use an Uber.

And more significantly, no car I own will EVER become an Uber. I don’t want some drunk barfing in my car, and I don’t want somebody’s kids smearing peanut butter in it. I don’t eat in my car, I don’t let other people eat in my car, and I’m certainly not going to throw my doors open to allow everybody to eat in my car.

So that’s my math - my car will NOT be joining this autonomous fleet. Other people can unleash their cars to be ruined by strangers; good for them. That won’t effect my actions in the slightest. I’m not that desperate for cash.

And speaking of that cash - you’re theorizing that a massive number of ‘drivers’ will swarm the roads. Do you not think that market forces will come into play here? You’re not going to be making big bank as a tiny fish in a massive pond. You’re going to be getting the bare minimum that would incentivize the poorest tiers of car owners to share their cars with strangers. Admittedly, there will probably higher-paying levels of taxi service - but to be one of those you’ll have to clean your car between every trip, because the people paying premium prices for rides aren’t going to be happy to find themselves sitting on a left-behind Pb&J. That won’t be something that you set loose to make you money while you sit around; that will be an active job - and thus, not the way most car owners will operate. Most of these Uber rides will be buyer beware, and priced accordingly.

Which is not to say that tons of people won’t be happy to submit their cars to such a system - in some areas (like densely packed cities) the demand for cars will probably be such that there will be tons of people with cars sitting in their garage 90% of their time just to take advantage of that sweet sweet rush hour money. But in places like where I live? Lots and lots of people will just own their own car.

45

I would say that? Maybe you would. I wouldn’t. I have all kinds of things that I could potentially hire out to make money, including myself. Some people do these things, but most don’t. Why would a self-driving car suddenly incite a tsunami of entrepreneurialism among people who’d never think of doing any such things today? If I pay good money for a valued new car, the last thing I want is random strangers bouncing in and out of it all day, teenagers spilling drinks and fast food all over it, and somebody’s kid throwing up in it.

46

What position are you arguing against? I don’t think anyone is saying private ownership of cars will be forbidden. It’ll just become a luxury and/or an eccentricity. Like people who own their own airplanes now.

I think you just explained why manual driving should become illegal. :confused:

47

Honest question, how many cars are currently parked within a 10 minute driving radius (let’s just say 4 miles) of your home and work locations? Even if only 20% of those are available to hail a ride, how many total cars is that?

I’m not saying everyone is going to switch overnight, people are still going to have personal cars for all sorts of reasons. But the financial and convenience factor (unless in really rural locations), just isn’t going to factor in that decision.

48

Using idle cars: While it’s true that most cars spend most of the day doing nothing, they tend to be required around the same hours. If 24 people need a car 1 hour/day, theoretically they could make do with 1 car/24 people but if most of them want to use it at 8AM and 5PM, they’ll need a car each. Unless that changes, the reduction in the number of cars may be existent but underwhelming.
LIDAR: It may provide basic information but the better the initial data you have, the more options you have for high-level processing. Red, green and blue are very basic data but when you’re clever about combining them, you can get interesting results.

People who know more about image/3D processing will be able to go into more depth but one very important datum which LIDAR can provide is closure rate through Doppler filtering, whose importance you can probably guess when it comes to vehicle safety. It’s also likely that different types of objects have different LIDAR Doppler signatures.

How much do LIDAR modules tend to cost? How has the price been changing over the last decade? A LIDAR AESA or active light-field camera may be 2-3 decades away but they seem like they could be extremely useful.

49

I have a feeling that what we’re going to see is a fairly rapid switchover to autonomous road vehicles among large fleet users as soon at the technology is available. At first, this will be semis and other point-to-point vehicles where there is infrastructure available to load and unload them. Then, as the model emerges, we’ll see residential delivery vehicles as soon as there’s a mechanism for unloading the stuff; I suspect that having to go unload a truck at the curb when it happens to show up will be a big negative to most customers, and people will deliberately choose their competition, except if the autonomous version is significantly cheaper or faster. I mean, now delivery companies will leave on your doorstep if you’re not there. Autonomous delivery vehicles will have to have some sort of ground drone to do the same.

As for consumer adoption, I’m not so sure. I don’t think the ability to farm your car out in off hours is going to be a game changer for the automobile market. Many people just won’t want to put the wear and tear on their own vehicle, nor be subject to the vagaries of calling a car and waiting for it. Plus, it won’t be in your nice, dry garage waiting for you on a rainy day. We can already look at how Uber and Lyft work and the various bikeshare programs- people still buy cars and bring their own bikes downtown, despite both of these being common where I live.

And people buy the cars they buy for specific reasons- maybe they want a SUV because they have 5 kids, or a pickup because they do a lot of home improvement, or a specific car model because they’re tall- for example my wife chose a VW Passat because the US-made ones can fit her 6’2" self with a kid car seat behind her, and most other sedans can’t do that. Merely renting some nameless autonomous Uber doesn’t get you any of those things guaranteed within your particular time frame- you may have to wait for the autonomous tall person car in the area to get done with someone else, or the autonomous pickups may be all in use when you feel like taking old branches to the dump.

I have a feeling what’s going to happen is that various semi-autonomous technologies will be incorporated in cars as time goes on, and eventually they’ll evolve into autonomous cars that end consumers will buy. I don’t see there being a massive rapid shift from widespread private car ownership to some kind of communal pay-as-you-go system. Maybe when they’re autonomous, some percentage will decide to try and profit by pimping them out as Robo-Uber or whatever, but I don’t see it being significantly different than the way things work today.

50

No way. People would give up their guns before they gave up their cars.

51

I dunno about you, but if I could hypothetically lend my car out at minimum wage for 21 hours a day ($5500/month), and I had it take itself twice a day to an automotive cleaning service (maybe $20 each time, so -$1200/month), and get fueled (~$60/day, -$1800/month), that still leaves $2500 a month, which is several times more than the car payment. Combine that with some sort of reasonable passenger rating & camera system that disincentives people from smearing peanut butter all over the seats, I think lots of people would strongly consider it.

Sure, expectations of “21 hours/day at minimum wage” is going to drop off catastrophically as more ‘drivers’ enter the system, but that is only going to encourage more ridership as prices flatline.

52

I think facing things like “surge” pricing for the 8AM and 5PM rides would cause people to start shifting work schedules accordingly until supply/demand settles. If the system is smart enough, it could allow for carpools to be intelligently routed for people going in the same commute direction and are willing to share a ride in exchange for a discounted fare.

53

I obviously have no way of knowing even a ballpark number, and in any case I live in my state’s capital, in an area that mixes suburbs and commercial area. There are probably more cars in the four miles around me than in any four mile radius region in the state - so me answering that question would only make you more confident than you should be.

I would guess that at least 80% of this state would be what you consider “really rural”.

54

I wasn’t aware that most people were allowed to shift their work schedules at will. Some could -I mean, I managed it- but even I only shifted my start time to by an hour. The best you’re going to do is extend the rush hours from one hour to three, leaving you with six hours of rush hour, twelve hours of moderate usage, and six hours of dead road.

Society isn’t going to reconfigure itself enough to have even road load, not even close. People aren’t going to have their cars making money for them for 21 hours of the day; the average car will probably be lucky to see half that, even if literally everyone decides to rely on autonomous Uber for transport.

55

People are already paying a significant “surge cost” in the form of lost time in traffic by traveling to/from work during rush hour.

If you want people to save a lot of time, find a way to stagger vehicle travel to cut down on traffic jams/slowdowns.

56

Nobody is going to pay your car minimum wage, even at the very start. People aren’t dumb and will notice there’s no human in the car, and thus won’t pay human prices. There’s no federal law that says people can’t underpay a car.

Once the prices flatline, how many people are going to be willing to open up their car for strangers to ride in?

57

This is what the free market is for. People have a lightly utilized asset, and other people have the technology to make that asset work. The market will set a price such that people who have the asset want to make it available, and people who need the asset will pay the price to use it.

The marginal cost of having your self driving car remotely pick someone up and deliver them is FAR lower than the marginal cost of having someone drive their car manually for a similar service.

Not only will the price to the owner reflect that, but so will the price to the consumer, which would make the savings from going with a Service all the greater. The market is good at getting to that equilibrium where both sides are willing to work.

58

Or more accurately, a price will be set where enough people will be bribed into renting their car out to roughly satisfy the people who are willing to throw that much money down for the service. Most certainly not everyone who has the asset will be convinced to make it available - just like not everybody with a need to travel will consider the rental price acceptable.

It’s good at finding the equilibrium necessary that the number of people willing to pay that price can find people willing to accept their money. There’s nothing saying that this equilibrium won’t price people out of the market - perhaps a lot of people. It ain’t like the market guarantees that everyone can hire a personal maid; similarly it might not hire you a robot chauffeur.

I do say it’ll be interesting to see how the average rider reacts to riding in other people’s cars completely unsupervised. If they’re as careless and irresponsible as I expect unsupervised humans to be, the price for convincing somebody to lend you their expensive self-driving car could end up pretty high. Particularly since the one shining example of where everybody needs to hire a ride is when they’re drunk.

59

Of course, but many people don’t value their time effectively, hence all the people that will drive 5 miles out of their way to save 30 cents on gas. Having that explicitly quantified (pay $4 to ride at 8AM, $2 to ride at 9AM) will put additional pressure on the user to look at alternate commute times, as well as free up availability for the cars from owners . Obviously every employer isn’t going to allow the same amount of job flexibility, but it puts additional market pressure on them as well.

60

It occurs to me that in all this discussion about Uber for all, I haven’t been actually talking about the scenario proposed by the OP, where individual car ownership has ended. Under that model you wouldn’t have individuals allowing others to use their cars, because individuals wouldn’t have cars; they’d instead have to be owned by, basically taxi companies.

Having giant taxi companies that handled all the car ownership and rented them out at will would avoid some of the problems we’ve been discussing; they could send out the cars and when a ride ended somebody could push a button, look at the cameras in car 62, and if it was smeared with peanut butter push the ‘recall’ button to bring it in for a hosing down. They could much more comfortably absorb the costs of terrible passenger than the average dude.

Which is not to say that they’d set a price that everybody would like, of course, but the prices would probably still be lower than they would be coming from individual car owners.