9 ms·

A couple of comments: And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold Actually, no it wouldn'

• shasta 15y ago
  Not to mention the immediate efficiency hit of the car driving empty between rides.
  • bigiain 15y ago
    I wonder what sort of population density and usage pattern you'd need before that worked in your favour? If my apartment complex had a few dozen cars shared between a few hundred apartments, perhaps the car I take to go shopping could pick up the next door kid from soccer on the way back, then a different car might pick me up at the shops when I'm done, after dropping some other neighbour at the movies... (I guess I'm now describing taxis. I wonder what the difference between this, and a taxi network of driverless cars is?)
    • bigiain 15y ago
      Responding to my own comment here... Anybody got both Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk's numbers in their speed dial? What if a "disrupt the cab industry" company got together with a "low moving part, high reliability electric car maker" to do an end-run around the expected auto industry opposition... A fleet of driverless electric taxis, all routed by smartphone apps and behavioural prediction...
      • bigiain 15y ago
        Then, when everybody is impressed with how well they work, you start selling fleets of them to Apple/Google/Oracle/SouthBayTechFirmDeJour - every evening a train of autonomous cars starts arriving and emptying out your campus 4 people per car heading for nearby/on-the-way destinations, all of a sudden those 20 hectares of parking lot can become cube farms or data centres... During the middle of the day and all night, you lease the capacity to FedEx or UPS...
        • slyn 15y ago
          As long as we're hitting this one out the ballpark we can imagine all the online services getting in on the action: like the OKCupid speed date commute, the Yelp surprise me whats for dinner restaurant ride, or the Groupon deal of the day carpool.
      • mediaman 15y ago
        Limited range cars with long recharge times would be a poor operating fit for economics that favor high utilization. There'd be too much downtime during peak times of day. Maybe it could be coupled with swappable battery pack stations that the autotaxis could visit to get a freshly charged pack. A geographically focused taxi company could have the financial resources to invest in the battery depot, which would also solve the standardization problem.
        • bigiain 15y ago
          Perhaps a revenue opportunity for cash-strapped cities? If we stop owning cars and the communal ones we use drive themselves home, we'll stop putting money in parking meters. Replace the parking meters with charging stations...
        • anifow 15y ago
          Sorry, that's been solved. There are efforts to implementing this exact network of fuelling stations (battery swapping) for electric cars, and Better Place is a shining example from Isreal: http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000704382 http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=10007...
    • ars 15y ago
      And I assume you will install and deinstall the carseat each time? A huge portion of cars are used to transport kids, and it's not practical to remove the carseat each time. You can't have a car with a loaner carseats either since they have to be individually adjusted to the kid. Every single time people talk about cars, and public transportation they always forget about kids. I see it over and over. Come on people - expand your worldview a little.
      • dolbz 15y ago
        I would expect that eventually the safety of automated cars will far exceed current levels and therefore child car seats won't be required in the same way that no-one uses a car seat on a train (or even a bus actually, which is presumably much more dangerous than a train)
      • XLcommerce 15y ago
        this doesn't sound like a show stopper to me... simply an opportunity for someone to invent a one-size-fits-all car seat :)
        • ars 15y ago
          Considering that there are 5 different types of car seats, and they can be adjusted to about 10 different configurations that's not going to be an easy task.
          • sethg 15y ago
            The people who design car seats these days know that their customers would rather spend an hour rethreading/reinstalling their car seat every six months than spend over $200 on the seat. But if there were a large fleet of shared cars on the road, and if some entrepreneur came out with a $1000 car seat that could be readjusted in seconds for a child of any size, then the owners of the fleet would have an incentive to loan out those seats along with the cars.
      • svnv 15y ago
        This just opens the market up to build a carseat that solves this problem. How about a regular seat that can be folded out or transformed into a seat suitable for children?
• frankus 15y ago
  If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly, like taxicabs do now. But it's also possible that cars would simply be built with more reliable components and more durable materials, like current aircraft and public transit vehicles are. It's not cost-effective to build an ultra-reliable car that's sitting idle 96% of the time, but the economics would surely change if the utilization rate is much higher.
  • bigiain 15y ago
    The thing is, taxis _don't_ wear out as fast as you'd think. I remember talking to an old-school cab driver a while back, when I noticed his odo had ~650,000km (~400k miles) on it. We chatted a bit about it, and when I asked "So how long do cabs last" he said "3 good crashes." It doesn't which of the locally popular cab models you buy and it doesn't matter how far you drive them - you might need to fit a reconditioned diff or gearbox or even motor, but all of that is "routine maintenance" from his point of view. Its after the third time you've crunched it hard into something that it's time to get rid of it...
    • maaku 15y ago
      Yeah, but if you replace the diff, gearbox, and motor, how much of the cab is really left (mechanically speaking)? Replacing the engine is, from an engine-maker's perspective, the same as buying a new car.
      • bigiain 15y ago
        Yeah, but from the cab owners perspective, $600 for a reconditioned diff or $1200 for a reco motor is a lot less hassle/expense than $40k for a new car, then getting all the cab-specific fitout done to it... (Yeah, that's what the base model cars used for cabs cost here. Google Holden Commodore or Ford Falcon prices. New car prices in Australia seem stupidly high to people used to American car prices...)
        • 15y ago
• brc 15y ago
  I was thinking along these lines on a similar thread recently. The particular thread implied that the cost would be much lower, because there was no driver involved. I agree that it would be lower, but not orders of magnitude lower, because the demand shape will be exactly the same - or even more pronounced. My hypothesis is that the driver is probably about 10-20% of the cost of a fare, the rest is the capital cost of the vehicle + licensing fees + insurance, and the marginal cost of maintenance and fuel. Because inevitably cars sit around most of the time, then the price of 5-6 busy hours of the day has to make up for the rest of the time. Further, with a disruptive business idea like this, I could easily see an auction-style interface for the vehicle booking, which would give a much better revenue curve (we are talking about Google). In that case, the peak-demand period would probably exceed the current (regulated) taxi fares. But the plus side of that is that a midnight ride would be very cheap due to lack of demand and simultaneous lack of a need to pay drivers more money to work nightshifts.
  • Turing_Machine 15y ago
    "that a midnight ride would be very cheap" Except possibly around whatever local time the bars close.
    • brc 15y ago
      Well, if you make the mistake of simultaneous closing times, yes. One other benefit would be that (hopefully) cheaper late night rides would cut down on drink driving.
• fleitz 15y ago
  Yes, cars may still sit around doing nothing at night, but the number of cars for peak traffic will drop significantly because of the gains in utilization. Imagine you want to ride share with your friends, one car will ferry people to and fro the highway which will be almost impeccably timed with your friends arrival at a waiting area just off the freeway. You'll get in the car and continue to work, after you arrive at work that car will go pickup someone in the city who works a bit later and grab a couple of their friends on the way. When you combine this technology with social networks and mobile the improvements to efficiency, cost, and quality of life will be astounding. This isn't going to be an overnight thing but I see this kind of thing becoming prevalent probably 5 to 10 years after the first driverless cars become publicly available. Driverless cars would be worth it simply for the reduction in drunk driving.
  • hessenwolf 15y ago
    Driverless cars would be awesome simply for the increase in drunk driving. This is a really good point actually, you could go out for the night and still drive home. Drink driving laws have had a huge negative impact on country living in rural Ireland, where the main social outlet is the local pub, and there isn't a taxi in the village.
• nt_mark 15y ago
  (cough) Public transport (cough)
• anabis 15y ago
  > if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day I got the image of cars migrating across the Eurasia, taking Chinese to work, then Indians, then Middle-easterns, etc.
• yason 15y ago
  If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. This is just a matter of the practical design choices. Any machinery that is in heavy use usually gets fitted, appropriately, with more robust set of parts which last many times longer before wearing out. Current consumer cars have bearings, joints, and moving parts that are carefully optimized to match the expected usage pattern (which is mostly idle) for a designated period of time and nothing more. That's why older cars can sometimes run for ages. Decades ago we didn't know how to make extremely light-weight parts from least amount of steel with a calculable expiry time of, for example, 40 thousand miles so engineers had to fit cars with slightly heavier and more expensive parts to make sure they didn't break too easily. Think about fitting bearings and joints from a heavy van into a light Japanese small car. Or consider old 70's-80's Saabs and Volvos that can last nearly forever. Likewise for fluids and lubrication, it's easier to clock high mileages with a car that is mostly in use throughout the day rather than with one that is used a couple of times a day for commuting. The engine wearout is at its peak during the first miles after a cold start.
  • rdl 15y ago
    Also, the 1970s and 1980s were a low point for cars in general -- lots of new environmental regulations were kicking in (including a whale oil issue which was discussed on hacker news), causing objectively worse reliability for many cars in the 1970s and 1980s vs. the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1990s the Japanese and German manufacturers seem to have resolved things, and by the 1990s, the US automakers.