In urban settings, when self-driving cars are common, people (generally) won't own cars. Owning a car – an expensive depreciating asset – will be an enthusiast thing, like golf clubs or whatever; eventually, the self-driving truck will tow your non-self-driving car to the track...
Assuming the pricing works, most people will just use a car service.
I don't believe that for one second. Would it be cheaper for me to take a taxi to work every day than drive my own car? Absolutely. Do I want to? Absolutely not. The comfort of having my own vehicle that is set to my own preference and loaded with my stuff whenever I need it trumps the cost argument. Shared vehicles are just gross.
>Would it be cheaper for me to take a taxi to work every day than drive my own car? Absolutely.
I don't believe that for one second. Assume that the average car costs $523/mo[1] (and if you wanted a lower car payment it's totally possible to get a cheap car with a lower monthly payment). That means the daily cost of the car is $17.19 (523*12/365).
An uber (which is often less than a taxi and way more convenient) costs about $15 to get to work if you live nearby (it would be closer to $30-40 if you lived in the suburbs), and another $15 to get back home (possibly more because of surge pricing, depending on when you leave and local events such as sports games etc). This is assuming you never want to drive to get groceries, visit friends, etc... That's another $10-15 each way, every time.
Sure you don't have to pay for gas but there's no way the <$1/ride increase will account for that. I suppose you might have to pay for parking, but even then you could just buy a cheaper car ($400/mo car payments aren't exactly unheard of) and use the difference to pay for monthly parking.
I think using numbers with human drivers doesn’t help because
a) the uber driver has much higher marginal cost on each drive than a self driving car because of the human in the drivers seat and
b) the self driving car is likely to have a much higher fixed cost than the taxi with a human driver because of the expensive computer, software and new hardware like lidar.
So self driving cars are in my best guess going to have very high fixed costs with very low marginal costs, which means there is a large opportunity for a “renters” market
> the self driving car is likely to have a much higher fixed cost than the taxi with a human driver because of the expensive computer, software and new hardware like lidar.
These will become commodities when the technology matures.
I've owned quite a few cars in my life and not once was my payment > $400 even when putting very little down (usually my current car). I only buy gently used, reasonably priced cars though. My current truck is a 2007.
I think the only way the math would work out favorably is if you had an expensive car, a short commute, or preferably both. For a regular appliance car, say a Prius, used strictly for commuting (5 days/week) the TCO would be about $21/day. This is almost exactly what Uber would charge me to go one way 14 miles to my office downtown (I live on the outskirts of the city). So about twice as expensive to use Uber, and only if it's just for commuting.
But if I had something fancy, like a Tesla Model X, the daily cost (similar parameters as before) works out to $68/day, and then I could save money by using Uber.
Of course, that's not really a fair comparison because the Tesla is much nicer than anything Uber is likely to pick me up in, so the Prius is a much more honest comparison.
> The comfort of having my own vehicle that is set to my own preference and loaded with my stuff
From this statement it seems like you either don't work in a city, or live outside of a large metropolitan area. There's little chance you're leaving stuff in your car routinely in a large city and not having it stolen. This isn't meant as an insult, but I think it means you're not in the target demographic for a shared self-driving car service.
"Loaded with my stuff" doesn't mean all of my favorite consumer electronics left in the open in the passenger's seat.
My behavior barely changed between living a mile away from the nearest person to parking daily in SF. Yes if I have something valuable in the cabin I'll put it in the trunk when I leave the car, but that's it.
The cost difference is likely to be much more than between a present-day taxi and a car. The biggest cost for taxis is the labor of the driver, which usually dwarfs depreciation/maintenance/gas by an order of magnitude. If taxis are currently cheaper than car ownership for you, self-driving cars may be cheaper than taxis may be cheaper than that by a factor of 10x.
Would you pay 10x to avoid having to share seats, particularly for an activity that's still a fairly large chunk of the household budget?
I would be interested in knowing how you calculated your numbers. I did some digging and found an old (10 years ago) report from the Univ of Illinois on the operating costs of taxis in Chicago. In round numbers, the typical taxi driver brought in just under 60K/year in revenue and had 42K/year in operating costs. Assuming there hasn't been a major upset since then, this is a very long ways from 10x.
I'm figuring that a typical taxi driver might make $30/hour and in that hour drive about 20 miles. At 30 mpg and $3.00/gallon gasoline that's about $2 for gas. Figure that a typical car costs $20K and lasts for 200,000 miles, so 20 miles = 1/10,000 of the car = ~$2 in depreciation. Maybe another $1/hour in maintenance - that'd imply about $2K/year, which seems high, but this is higher mileage than a family car anyway. Total about $5/hour, which would be around 1/6 labor costs; not quite 10x, but around that ballpark.
Switch to electric vehicles (which are suddenly feasible with the car-service, never-have-to-park model!) and centralize maintenance across a whole fleet of cars and you can shave a bunch off gas & maintenance, though your depreciation would probably go up unless battery packs became dirt cheap.
It'll depend a lot on the difference in price for people - or another way of thinking about it is you can rent a better car than you can buy.
I think a lot of people will have much higher cost pressures than many of us on HN (at least, my impression is that we here are typically well above local median wages). That may push it a lot, and even more when you remove the upfront costs.
Also personally I'd love to not have to own a car. If it's even cheaper - great.
American buses really aren't that gross, they just don't go a lot of the places most people need to go. Plus they stop running at weird times (the one that stopped at the place I interned during the summer had the last pickup time at 6PM, so if you weren't done by then you needed an uber. Plus that office park was the most rural stop in the bus system so you had to live further down town if you needed to take it.
Assuming the pricing works, most people will just use a car service.