scr4 it depends on your situation. My family has me working out of the home and my wife a stay at home parent. I drive 30-45min to get to my job, so it wouldn’t be practical to send the car home for her. If I worked in NYC, I’d drive 5-10min to a train station, and sending the car home would be completely sensible. If AVUber was a thing, and at a good price, we would probably drop down to one car and my wife would Uber most places. We would then have our own car for evenings and weekends.
If you’re just using a car on some evenings and some weekends, that makes owning a car even less appealing - why not use Ube (or in the future, self-driving cars) then as well?
In the US, cars sit, parked, something like 96-97% of the time, on average. You’re paying for the privilege of having a car parked in your driveway almost the entire time.
(I’ve seen studies that estimate that car ownership pays for itself at around 17,000 miles/year of driving).
Car ownership is already down among millennials, by the way - fewer people are getting their license before the age of 18, and cars purchased by the under-34 group is also down.
For some people owning their own car will remain a necessity, but for most others it won’t be. I’d wager car ownership will decline by 80-90% (at least in the US) in 20-30 years. Self-driving cars are going to help solve traffic problems and drunk driving in one fell swoop.
Sheesh, pedantic much? I wasn’t equating the actual technology itself, my point was 30 years ago, the idea of not having your own phone number tied to a landline in your house with a number in the phone book was almost unheard of.
Now we have other options, the idea of not owning your own landline is no longer unheard of. Ditto cars in 30 years.
For lots of people it’s a free privilege. I (and many, many, many other people) get their parking space or driveway as part of the package deal that got them their residence.
The actual, non-silly argument about stationary cars is one from a resource perspective: if we used cars efficiently, the country could get by with 96-97% fewer cars. (Presuming a world of spherical cows, anyway.) This is something worth paying attention to if you’re trying to supply the world’s cars, like if you’re trying to figure out how many cars you should buy for the city’s Uber fleet, but it’s not something that an individual car owner is generally worried about. Sure, if they’re paying extra for a separate garage to keep their cars in, then in that case it’s a cost they’ll be accounting for. But for millions of people it’s a non-issue, and honestly a really silly thing to say.
Some people still have landlines though - people who don’t see the benefit to a cell phone, or who consider the downsides and costs of a cell phone to be worse than the downsides and costs of a landline.
The same thing will apply to owning a car versus paying Uber to rent you one by the mile. And unlike cell phones, whose downsides can be a bit subtle, I see lots of really obvious downsides to relying on Uber for daily travel. Which is not to say that some people won’t choose to rely on Uber for daily travel - some certainly will. And some others will simply rely on it for occasional travel.
The real balance will of course depend to some degree on how the (theorized) widespread Uber model eventually plays out - notably including its costs. If one’s daily commute each and every day occurs during ‘surge pricing’, then I suspect that quite a lot of people in that situation will seek alternatives to Uber.
Some people, sure. But not all - heck, not even most; a majority of households are now wireless-only; 10-15 years ago I’d wager that well over 90% of phones had a landline. That number is steadily dropping and will continue to drop.
Landlines are going the way of the VCR.
It’s not just the parking space, it’s the car too. Tying up assets in a car and driveway/garage for a device that is unused 97% of the time. Heck, my driveway takes up 10% of my property’s area, that’s land I could have for some other use if I (and potential future land owners) didn’t need a car.
You seem to forget that garages aren’t just some place where we shack up our cars when they’re not in use.
More importantly to many, if not most garage users is the fact that they’re more or less out of the elements. While AVUber would obviate the ones that are caused by sitting out in the weather (ice, snow, excessive heat), they still wouldn’t help if it was raining, snowing, etc… and you’d still have to go out in the rain, etc…
Another point against AVUber versus private ownership is car seats. I don’t know if you’ve ever put them in, but they’re enough of a pain in the ass that I wouldn’t want to install one and take it back out EVERY single time I tried to take a child somewhere. Nor would I trust that some random car seat installed in an AVUber would be in good condition, not expired, or installed correctly.
Now you may say “Well, with autonomous cars, we won’t need car seats”. That may be, but there will almost certainly be at least a decade if not two when we have a mix of self-driving cars and the human-piloted kind on the roads, and car seats will still be important during that period.
Allow me to ask, is your goal with this analogy to argue that ALL forms of old technology are supplanted and disappear altogether in a handful of years? VCRs are gone, but are you also saying that DVDs are gone because of blu-ray, and that blu-ray is evaporating because of streaming?
Print books no longer exist because of ebooks?
Bicycles no longer exist because of cars?
Or here’s a really direct analogy - is it your opinion that the existence of restaurants and takeout will eradicate the notion of cooking at home? (Any day now, presumably.) On the one hand you have person doing something themselves, with tools they bought themselves and (god forbid) have to store themselves, as opposed to paying somebody else to do it for them?
If anything people should abandon home cooking quicker than car ownership, because home cooking is work. So presumably you think that the second somebody gets the chance to pay more for somebody else to do it, freeing them from having to buy and store ingredients and cooking utensils, they will abandon cooking forever, right?
The owners of the AVUber had to pay for the car asset too, and that cost will be passed on to the consumers, unless you’re proposing that they’re going to be operating a charity. In fact they’ll also be passing on to you the cost of at least a certain amount of parking space - the cars won’t be on the road all the time, and the rent on the garages must be paid.
There seems to be this bizarre notion that Uber is running a charity, and that when the drivers exit the equation the price of a ride will drop to nothing. Personally I’d be a bit surprised if the price drops at all. Why should it? The customers are willing to pay it. Supply and demand, yo. Sure there might be a brief period while they try and undercut the competition and run them out of business (like if Uber gets AVs and Lyft doesn’t), but once the field is clear, a ride will cost what a ride costs.
It’s the difference between an asset that is only used by you, vs. an asset that’s shared by many people. In the latter case, the cost of the asset is also shared. Even if an AVUber car is only used by 4 people a day on average, and they charge a 100% markup, your share of the cost would be 1/2 that of owning it yourself.
Yo, customers are NOT willing to pay it. At the current price, Uber is able to undercut Taxis and get a fraction of the total transportation market. If the price of their supply drops, since folks won’t have to sit in their car to run AVUber, they’d be fools to leave their price as-is. They could drop price and make REAL volume increases by undercutting 2nd car ownership. That’s a market 100x as big as taxi trips.
And, BTW, I’d appreciate pumping the brakes a bit on how dimwitted and bizarre the other side of the argument is. I’ve spent the better part of 2 decades pricing services, calculating margins, and helping businesses figure out where they’re making money and where they’re not. I’m not going to be holding anymore Finance 101 classes here trying to explain how spreading the fixed cost of an asset over dozens of customers is cheaper than each one of those customers owning one of the assets personally.
Only if the disappearance of the old technology benefits society. Analog cell phones, for example. They don’t exist anymore, because they used a lot more radio bandwidth than newer digital cell phones. There are no holdouts, because the service doesn’t exist anymore.
Same with analog TV. Maybe you kept yours, but it doesn’t show broadcast TV anymore. Because there was a big benefit to society to switch over to digital broadcasts.
I suspect land lines may face the same fate soon. Phone companies will no longer find it profitable to run land lines to new neighborhoods, or even maintain the existing ones. At some point the few holdouts will have their land lines disconnected and be given VoIP phones or cell phones.
You mentioned bicycles. Those are not allowed on most freeways. My workplace (part of a US Army base) just banned bicycles from their 2 main roads.
Manually driven cars are the same. There are many benefits to banning them from public roads. It will happen one day.
Privately owned self-driving cars shouldn’t be a problem though. But at some point it will become an extravagance, an unnecessary expense for most people.
I’d appreciate a reduction in the spherical cow arguments (like the ones that presume the cars instantly teleport from one customer to the next and disappear from existence entirely between customers) and a reduction in the blatant dismissal of the fact that relying entirely on AVUber for your transport will indeed result in an inferior user experience as compared to owning your own car.
I’d also appreciate if people didn’t present half a situation. Yes, the cost of the car is spread out. The use of the car is similarly spread out. If each person rides in Ubers as much as they ride in their own car, then they will effectively have used the car equivalently to if the Uber served only them. In which case they will, necessarily, shoulder the cost of a car unless the Uber is running a charity.
Now of course you could make an argument that a person who buys a car burns up 97% of the car’s value while it’s parked. This view presumes the car experiences similar wear (ie: loss of value) while it’s parked as while it’s in use. I reject that idea because I believe it’s stupid. Yes, if everybody threw their old cars away after having owned them for a calendar year than an Uber car would get orders of magnitude of bang for its buck than a privately owned car, but that’s not how cars are used. Uber cars will wear out MUCH quicker than a privately owned car.
And a fair amount of that wear will occur while not driving anybody anywhere. The Ubers will burn gas and effective lifetime driving to their next fares and to parking spaces where they will wait for fares. Somebody’s going to be paying for this too, and it’s not going to be Uber.
Based on all that, I’m not seeing how any argument can be made that Ubers will magically create utility over a privately owned car. Ubers will get used faster, and spend more of their use time with no passenger, and privately owned cars will last longer and always generate utility while in use. One may be more efficient than the other but I don’t see a clear argument for either being obviously superior - not a valid argument, anyway.
I absolutely agree that manually driven cars will go the way of the dodo, and never meant to imply they wouldn’t. (It’ll take more than ten years though, given how long people hold on to the things, barring legislation to the contrary of course.)
It’s privately owned self-driving cars that I think will remain indefinitely. There are significant advantages to having your car right there, already stocked with all the carseats, radio settings, and stocked minibars that you need for your daily commute, that Uber will be unable to match.
No, it presumes that the car depreciates in value even if not used, as well as experience age-related problems. If you bought a new car, parked it on your driveway and never touched it, and sold it 5 years later, you would lose thousands of dollars. Partly because it’s still a used car, and partly because the car wouldn’t be in new condition.
Like I said, I’m not holding class anymore. What you can’t see now is on you, not me.
But you agree that the Uber will be cheaper, right? The question is whether people will be willing to pay for these conveniences and accept all the other non-monetary costs of car ownership (time it takes to clean your car regularly, time to take it to repair shops, space taken up by the car at home, etc).
This would partly depend on how much cheaper the Uber is. But even if it’s break-even (which it can’t be, for reasons already given), not having those other non-monetary costs would be worth it to many people.
And it would also be generational. For millennials, the car isn’t the status symbol or symbol of freedom that it was to the previous generation. Fewer people are even getting drivers licenses. (My youngest co-worker had to learn to drive after accepting a job here in Alabama.) So a transition to self-driving Ubers will be pretty smooth.
And that’s not how people use their cars either.
If you’re a car ‘flipper’, who really really cares about resale value (and not, say, about riding in it), then yes, it would matter. And the Uber car’s value would be in the toilet five years later due to the extreme use, of course.
You are completely missing my point. Read it again, and the related posts.