No. I currently see no reason to think that paying for an Uber every single trip forever will be cheaper than buying a car every ten years and powering and maintaining it in the meantime.
The only of these three parenthetical arguments which is interesting (read: non-silly) to me is the repair shop one, and it occurs to me that that might be mitigated by the self-driving aspect of the car itself. You could tell it to take itself to the shop, and just wait for the phone call telling you the cost. (If you desperately needed to go somewhere in the meantime, you could suck it up and pay extra for an Uber.) You’d still have to pay for the repair, yes, but Uber is making you pay for its maintenance costs too so that’s a wash.
There will be many people who prefer Uber. Hell, there are probably many people who prefer Uber now. There are probably people who have spent their entire lives riding exclusively in taxis. Among other things it would depend very heavily upon where you live - I gather it’s insane to own a car in New York City now, whereas here in Boise it’d be insane not to.
Putting aside the tykes living in one of those places that already de-emphasize car ownership, I suspect that a large factor in decreased car ownership in millennials is they can’t afford the damn things, and that they are more likely to find themselves living with their parents who can loan them a car or simply drive them places.
Well, that is also a factor in downward pressure on private car ownership, of course.
I think an interesting sidebar on the question of “what’s going to happen to private car ownership?” is “what’s going to happen to individual private car ownership?”. Even if many people still prefer not to share vehicles with strangers, will autonomous vehicles significantly reduce their average number of cars per family and/or per household because it’s now logistically easier to share a vehicle with a few selected non-strangers?
One car shared between a few people would lead to very poor availability - i.e. high likelihood of two people needing that car at the same time.
Several cars shared between dozens of people might work better. But why stop there, when the more cars & more people are in the sharing agreement, the more convenient it is?
But I suppose there may be several tiers, with some companies operating fleets of immaculately maintained luxury cars (priced accordingly), and some others operating cheaper cars.
Many one-car households already make it work, though, and if the car could convey itself from one co-owner to another as needed, that would make it easier.
Of course, it would require some basic schedule coordination and communication about sharing the vehicle, but again, there are many one-car households that already achieve that.
As for bringing in more people, I think the relevant point here is that some people don’t want to share vehicles with strangers but don’t mind sharing them with a few known and trusted non-strangers.
But we now have ways to make strangers accountable for their actions. Uber already lets passengers rate the drivers & their cars (which is why Ubers tend to be cleaner than taxis), as well as allowing drivers to rate the passengers. It would be easy to provide enough incentives & accountability to make sure people keep the cars clean, if that’s what you are worried about. E.g. if multiple people find the car in unsatisfactory condition right after you’ve used it, they could charge you a penalty. If you make a mess by accident, you’d be able to self-report and pay a modest cleaning fee.
Sure, that’s not the issue. (Remember, I’m the one who’s been saying here that the occasional references to shared vehicles as intrinsically filthy and gross and disgusting are rather exaggerated anyway.)
The point I’m raising is just that since there likely always will be people who don’t like sharing vehicles with strangers (irrespective of how empirically justified their dislike may or may not be), what wll be the effect of autonomous-vehicle use on the tendency of those people to share vehicles with a few non-strangers?
I suspect in most households where multiple drivers share one car, there’s a clear hierarchy of who owns it and who has to ask permission before they can take it out for the evening. This reduces problematic conflicts; it a person can’t use the car there’s usually a reason, and in any case they never had a sure expectation of being able to use the car anyway.
This might not work so well if two different households both want the car at the same to do something like get to work. If neither household considers themself the subordinate driver it could get ugly.
I guess it would be similar to people who own beach houses or countryside retreats. Some people would buy one knowing they can help pay for it by lending it out on Airbnb. Some would even settle for part ownership of a property that they only get to use a couple weeks a year (time-share). Some would buy one and let friends/family use it when they aren’t using it. And some people will never let others use it, because they don’t need that extra income, or they want the house to be available anytime they feel like going there, without having to schedule it in advance.
Of course, the rest of us stay in hotels or rentals.
Hmm. I know several married couples who share a car they own jointly (that is, one car per couple), and it doesn’t really seem to be “hierarchical” or “permission”-based in the way you describe. Of course, they tend to do a lot of communicating about their schedules anyway, and also to have a higher likelihood of going to the same place at the same time than unrelated people.
I’d only really expect the sharing to break down when you had people sharing a single car between multiple residences. If everybody was all in the same residence it would pretty much work the same as it does when a family is sharing a manually driven car today (however that family chooses to handle that), perhaps with some added ease from being able to send the car out to drop people off somewhere or fetch them without having to send a whole 'nother person along as chauffeur.
Seriously? I can’t believe I actually have to point this out to you, but…ok. In addition to what scr4 said…
The technology itself probably won’t disappear. But as for the technology as a viable business? That might be a different story. How comfortable would you be opening a bookstore today vs 1994? In the US, the number of bookstores has fallen almost by half in just 10 years. Bookstore sales declined from over $15 billion in 2010 to around $11 billion in 2015. Books won’t disappear - independent bookstores still appear to be doing pretty well - but the bookstore economy of the future is going to be very, very different. Who remembers getting pissed off at getting pennies on the dollar back at the end of the school year trying to sell back your college text book that cost $100+? Digital text books are available for a fraction of the cost, they never wear out, I can mark ‘em up all I want (LiquidText is friggen’ amazing) and I can carry dozens of text books on my iPad.
Re: VCR and DVDs - have you seen how disc sales have been doing recently? Revenue down 10% in 2016. Down 15% in 2017. B&M rental sales down almost 20% in two years. Streaming is taking over, so yes - VCRs have all but died out. I’d expect the same for DVDs.
When’s the last time you took actual film to get developed? Do some people still shoot on non-digital cameras, using actual film? Sure - but that’s decidedly not mainstream.
Restaurants and takeout vs eating at home isn’t really the same thing so it’s a silly analogy to make.
I think your expectations are premature, but honestly, based on the timeframes proposed by some people in this thread for the Great Car Switchoever, DVDs should already be gone. Are they?
I’m the wrong person to ask that; I’ve taken fewer than two dozen pictures in my life, film or digital. Perhaps less than a dozen; I forget how many shots I took on that camera I was given as a child and never bothered to develop.
It’s interesting to look at the film/digital thing and see how badly it compares with this Uber business. With the switch from film to digital, for the vast, vast, vast majority of users there were literally no downsides, and many, many upsides.
With this Uber thing there are downsides galore - depending on how you currently handle your personal transportation. As compared to some kinds of transportation it’s easily as good - if you take taxis everywhere, if you take busses, if you bum lifts off of friends. If you constantly have to part in garages that charge. If you constantly leave your car at airports.
They just happen to be shit compared to a car that’s personally owned that you can use without unusual fees. And lots of people own a car, and are accustomed to the benefits they get from owning the car. These people are going to notice that compared to their own car Ubers are a step down.
For some people they’re a step…up? (Are they? Honestly, from the sound of it they’re probably going to be a lateral move from manned Ubers, unless the price drops much further than I expect it to.) But for others they will be a definitive step down.
Many of those people will continue to want to own cars, despite the lure of suddenly having to pay more.
Hell, there’s a market for vinyl records in this day and age. And I get the vague impression that the people who want them are getting them. So too will some people continue to own cars. And I suspect not a vanishingly small number of them either. Ubers just have too many downsides.
Perhaps I’d be more impressed by the “everybody will switch to Uber” argument if everybody already had switched to Uber - Uber already exists, you know. And I don’t really think that the primary reasons for people not taking Uber to work each day are “I want to pay more per mile, just not that much more per mile” and “I don’t want the driver raping me”. (Those certainly are reasons to avoid manned Uber, I just don’t think they’re the dominant ones. The dominant reason is, of course, “I already have a car!”)
I declare it’s an excellent analogy, and the only reason you don’t like it is it blows your “it’s super-awful to have to store cars/pots that you only use now and then in garages/cupboards that could otherwise be used to store porn/porn, so people will flock to the chance to per-use rent the thing they were otherwise storing the tools for to do themself!” argument into smoldering shreds.
It’s a horrible analogy because restaurants are not a cheaper option than eating at home. The whole argument most are making about the decline of the personally owned car is that it won’t make economic sense to do so.
I don’t really understand the actual premise of your question - nobody is saying the technology (cars) will disappear…
Ubers most definitely will not be cheaper than driving a car you personally own. If they were then Uber would go out of business.
The only way to make Uber smell cheaper than private car use is to count the cost of the privately owned car. (It also helps to ignore the cost of the Uber-owned car.) The thing is, if a person already owns a car (and several dozen people in fact do), then the car’s price is a sunk cost. You don’t consider it as part of the price of driving any more than you consider the price of your pans when you calculate the cost of your home-cooked meal.
To wander into the weeds a bit, my dad goes to movies a lot, so he has a membership at a local theater. The way this works is he pays a rather large lump sum at the start of the year, and can watch as many movies as he wants for no additional cost. And the way he describes this (with tongue in cheek) is “See, the first movie I see there is really expensive, but all the rest after that are free!”
Purchased cars are like that, but without the tongue in cheek. Once a car has been purchased the cost of using it is the car payment, and the fuel and maintenance cost. If your car is paid off, then the total cost is the fuel and maintenance - and the Uber price will necessarily be enough to cover their fuel and maintenance, plus profit.
Which means that for everybody who actually owns their car (and everybody who isn’t in the mood to default on their car loan), Uber isn’t a step down in price. It’s a step up.
This thread is about whether privately owned cars will disappear as a result of AVUbers replacing them in society. That is the ‘technology’ in question, and the OP is proposing that the ‘technology’ of private car ownership will disappear.
My position is that privately owned cars won’t disappear. Car companies won’t stop selling cars to individuals, and the market of individuals who want privately owned cars won’t dry up. I don’t even think it will significantly diminish. I think that the majority of people who currently own cars will continue to want to own cars.
Heck, the (flimsy) argument for Ubers being cheaper than owned cars has an even more fatal flaw - it assumes that people are fully informed and rational agents. Which is an assumption I’d hope we wouldn’t make. Most people aren’t going to be adding up the total projected lifetime cost of owning their car and carefully comparing it against the total projected lifetime cost of driving their car off a cliff and switching to Uber (while assuming Uber will never change their pricing, naturally). What they’re going to do is look at the price of an Uber for a daily ride to work and recoil. That or they’ll look at the daily price of an Uber for a daily ride to work, compare it to how much they pay for gas, and then recoil. It’s an additional expense that people just don’t need.
There’s a few subtle details you are missing. As you yourself admit, you can’t just ignore the $60,000 elephant in the room, the actual sticker price of the car. (60k is an estimate for the production cost, to the manufacturer, of a typical autonomous car in large volumes)
While humans are irrational, very few humans have so much money that this cost difference doesn’t make a huge difference on a day to day basis. People who initially can’t afford their own car may never buy one once they can afford one because just renting is serving all their needs.
Detail 1 : Shorter range EVs work a lot better if you don’t need the vehicle to do more than cover known distance pickups. From the perspective of a fleet owner, as requests for rides come in, you send the ones that have enough range remaining to do the run and you send vehicles with low batteries to the charger. Only some of the vehicles need even be hybrids.
Detail 2 : If you are willing to share, the owners of the uber can carpool you.
Detail 3 : you could build a much smaller car than you think. More like a motorcycle with an aeroshell. This is going to have far lower costs than a car you’d buy for yourself. Sure, it doesn’t carry more than 1 person plus cargo, but when you have more than that to carry, you summon something bigger with your phone or watch or whatever.
Detail 4 : the economic model here is the manufacturer of the vehicles owns them and rents them by the mile. No intermediaries. This in turn means that as they break, the maker, who decides which parts go in them, actually has an incentive to make the vehicles last longer with less maintenance and also be easier to fix. This could easily result in 2-5 fold reduction in per mile maintenance costs. My reference point is how consumer cars have about a 200k design lifespan, and big rigs have a million mile+ design lifespan, and yet the cost difference is not linear. (yes, semis are a quarter million new, but they are also massively larger with far bigger and more specialized parts)
The AVUber concept will have to be significantly cheaper than owning a car to overcome that, since people do assign value to their time and convenience, And I’m not at all convinced that the prices can be driven low enough through owning the cars and amortizing costs over more trips (and presumably more miles) than a personal car would have, in order to overcome that.
The other thing is that if we’re looking at some kind of model where large companies run the fleets of AVUbers, then there’s an incentive to limit the supply of cars- if they’re scarce (relatively speaking) then they can charge more. That’s how taxis work- it’s why there are medallions. And it’s also why Uber is eating their lunch now- there are no restrictions on the number of Uber/Lyft drivers there can be.
The flip side is that if we’re back to some sort of crowdshared model where some people own cars and farm them out for ridesharing, and some don’t, there will still be a lot of people who own cars themselves- if only to keep the system working, or because the rideshare cars are scarce.
There will be some kind of equilibrium point, and my intuition says that it’ll be one where there are more personal car owners than strict ridesharers.
That won’t work if more than 1 company operates such a service. If Uber limits the number of their self-driving cars, and Lyft deploys more self-driving cars, people will use the Lyft cars.
Regular uber is cheaper in some use cases. For instance, I have a coworker that lives 4 miles from work. He spends $40 a week on uber rides and bums rides from friends about half the time. (it’s $8 a ride, which sounds expensive)
Contrast to me, where I have to pay $90 a month just for insurance, plus a yearly fee for registration, plus fuel, plus maintenance, plus depreciation. When i add all these costs up it’s around $300 a month for me.
If AVUber is half the cost, which seems like a conservative and reasonable assumption, my friend would be paying $80 a month. And even if he visited Atlanta every other weekend, a 60 mile round trip journey, that adds only $240 a month.
For the posters in this thread who ignore depreciation because they plan to drive their cars forever : this is not realistic. There are other forms of depreciation than just the price your car would fetch if you sold it.
a. If your car gets totaled in an accident, the depreciated cost still matters. If it's too low you're going to have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket to get another car, regardless of insurance coverage.
b. Eventually the parts for your car are going to become rare and expensive and it will be financially expedient to crush it.
c. Certain components do age from straight time, not mileage.
d. Remember how all the gasoline now is 10% ethanol? Not good if you have an old car.
All these factors put an invisible real cost on your car. It’s not free to own one, even if you put no miles on it and it’s fully paid for.
Honestly, I’m not expecting people to abandon their cars in their driveway because Uber is cheaper, I’m expecting them to not incur the huge cost of buying a new one because there is a viable, convenient, and less expensive alternative.