When you reach that stage of technology, why own a car at all ? By Ubering/Renting/Leasing into a fleet of autonomous cars, you get all of that with the addition of:
* Be able to chose the car for your immediate present needs (car/truck/sport)
* Have a car anywhere in the world
* Save money as you no longer need private parking space in your property.
Also most likely the cost of private car ownership is likely going to increase to the domain of luxury.
First because car manufacturer will want a piece of the fleet pie (see Volvo) and that will be a disputed market between Manufacturer/Uber-like/Rental Companies.
Then government are going to like fleets. Working with a few large partners is going to make stuff like dynamic traffic management doable, cities will be able to enforce very strict policies, and minimise the space allocated to car. For example in the EU they are destroying public parking space in the cities, do not allow building of private parking space either for offices or houses.
So car manufacturer won't want to sell you car and government won't want you to own one - good luck :-)
But a car that can drive me while I sleep and become a Taxi while I work is something I would go into debt for.
I don't think most regular people will actually own fully autonomous cars to rent them out. Big players will do the capital expenditure to buy a fleet, and rent out transportation service. Renting in uber style will be basically the price of owning, but without the up-front capital expenditure, and it will provide the convenience of choosing the type of car for the specific transport needs of the moment. The margins of these rent-a-fleet services will be low, so you won't have a hope as individual car owner of actually buying a car and renting it out without turning it into a loss compared to just renting.
Fair enough, I trust you on your own preferences, but car ownership is already trending down. More people each year are living in bigger cities. That's where ride-services are most convenient – and become even more efficient with a high density of cars and riders. And it's also where private car ownership can already be superfluous and expensive.
Self-driving cars-for-rent will get you places both faster and cheaper than possible in your own car. That could make private car ownership seem quaint or even ostentatious in most cities.
If I had a self-driving car and some time on my hands, I'd get rid of my home and be in that thing practically 24/7, seeing the land and enjoying having it drive me around. No way I would rent in that situation. I'd definitely buy. There will be a whole class of similar nomads who will spring up once it becomes truly viable.
The future is not one-size-fits-all. Just because Uber execs and investors are blathering about how personal car ownership will go away (meaning they will own everything, how convenient) doesn't mean it actually will happen that way.
Exactly. There will be sales pitches when fully autonomous cars are available to buy: pay $xk up front, but lease the car to a fleet for $y/month to recoup some of your investment. Uber might require owners to maintain and clean the cars in order to qualify, saving themselves the cost.
It's not dissimilar to the way people throw their houses into the pool of accommodation that is Airbnb or VRBO, etc.
You are in a privileged position. Regulations will follow the introduction of self driving cars to make owning a car a much more expensive proposition. With wages stagnant for decades, the mass market will be forced into the rental model. That will be able to cover their use case as well as your use case because there won't be as many of you.
Whoever wants to be in the business owns the cars, like every other rental/service offering. Whatever the liability challenges, they are likely less than current cars-with-drivers, after removing human error, emotions, and criminality.
You aren't likely to want to own your own self-driving car in a major city, unless you're an eccentric rich person, or a car hobbyist, or a old fogie. Urban garage/parking space is expensive for an asset that's idle 22+ hours of every day, and fueling/maintenance/looking-for-parking are likely not the best marginal use of your time.
What's your dislike of "something used by tens of thousands of unknown people", as long as it's well-maintained? Do you avoid libraries, sidewalks, parks, airports, shops, and restaurants?
Right now, Uber and other transport-network-providers are becoming "people I know and trust", because their systems have consistently delivered quick, clean, reasonably-priced rides across many times/places. App-dispatching a suitable-quality autocar from the nearest competitive local provider is going to save a lot of time/energy/pollution, compared to coordinating loaners from friends/family.
If transport regulators like city councils and taxi commissions were better at this sort of thing, they'd have bootstrapped a similarly rapid and ubiquitous ride-service years earlier, using their unique governmental coordination powers. Instead, they let a patchwork of inferior alternatives fester for decades.
I'm not sure of the eventual market structure of autocar-dominated city streets. Automation and standardization might make room for many providers, or just a few. Regulators could easily screw things up, by locking in specific practices or incumbent providers based on early guesses, biases, and corruption.
We'll just have to let lots of things be tried and see what works. For rapidly exploring the possibility space, the vigorous investor-fueled competition we're seeing now is very helpful.
Or with self-driving cars the rental industry will become the next uber since they won't need a driver. Everyone would just lease a "car privilege" from a rental company which (or others) would be picking you up whenever you need it following your patterns a fleet of cars will be shared among more people. This would reduce pollution, waste and traffic in large cities.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. Are you talking about some kind of monopoly or trust that prevents Uber/Lyft et al from getting access to self driving cars? That seems unlikely to me. As far as the various industries centered around car ownership I don't see why they'd go anywhere. Self driving cars will still need maintenance, oil, tires, etc. The only thing changing here is who owns the car. I don't want that to be me. As soon as it is economical for me to pay for transportation as a service and get rid of my money pit that is parked outside my apartment 24/7 I will do so.
I don't understand this autonomy angle for several reasons. One is of course that legally (and technically) full autonomy is a long, long time away so we'll still have drivers in cars that want to be paid, but more importantly, Uber doesn't even own autonomous cars.
Are they really, in addition to all their other costs, going to stock up on millions of expensive autonomous vehicles? That's unrealistic. And if they don't, what stops for example peer-to-peer solutions to emerge that let's people rent out their cars directly? It's very possible we don't need a middleman here when autonomy is ready.
I'm usually sceptical of all the decentralised, smart-contract stuff, but renting your car to some agreed upon destination or for some time through a open-source free application sounds actually doable.
I don’t imagine private vehicle ownership will disappear entirely. It will just become even more of a luxury than it already is.
When autonomous vehicles halve the cost of an Uber/Lyft journey, many more people will weigh up the costs/benefits of private vehicle ownership and decide it’s not for them.
Different services will compete based in part on the luxuriousness of the interiors and the frequency at which they are cleaned.
As private vehicle ownership becomes rarer, so to will parking, particularly on-street parking. People will look back and think it odd that we dedicated vast public spaces to the storage of private property.
Finally, as private vehicle owners become a minority group, they will become an easy target for even more punitive taxation and regulations which will see the group shrink even further still.
Also I suspect private car ownership will dwindle as full self-driving replaces human drivers. In this world (10-20 years from now) future-Uber will own fleets of self-driving EV taxis. The company will derive additional profit from acting as grid storage.
I don't think see the point of owning a car, if it's used by other people for most the day. I think there is going to be a big company that owns most cars.
Uber could raise the capital for it on the stock market. The problem that I see is that Uber doesn't have the technology.
In a world where self driving cars are a commodity, Uber's brand could be an advantage. But in reality, by the time Uber gets access to the technology the market has already been taken by others.
obviously at that point people start to question if ownership is necessary given how easily and quickly you could summon a unit out of a fleet and only pay for what you use. And thus uber for self-driving-cars was born.
Longer term traffic could probably be reduced by autonomous-only roads/infrastructure that has less need for traffic lights, etc.
Uber have the right idea here; own the platform, not the infrastructure. Lets face it, a cars spends most of its life stationary, waiting for you to drive it. Not so the autonomous vehicle. Autonomous vehicles are freed from the shackles of parking so why not lease your car to Uber and have it earn money as a cab? The future will be a bad time to get into car parking.
I'm not sure why you think self-driving cars necessarily mean the end of all private vehicle ownership?
Certainly cheap readily available taxis will be a popular choice, but if people feel there are advantages to owning their vehicle then they will do so.
Then sure, absolutely, but there will always be people who will want to own the car not rent it for a plethora of different reasons that perhaps do not apply to you. And the argument here is that those people who chose to own self-driving cars will still have to insure them - the fact that the car drives itself doesn't change the fact that you could be liable for any damages that happen when it's on the road.
And as an aside - how is this different than a taxi then, at that point? If that model already works for you, then uber fills that niche already. Unless there is some assumption that somehow it would end up being cheaper than uber? I can bet it would be cheaper for me to take ubers to work than own my car, and yet I'd prefer to have my own person vehicle and not deal with shared vehicles.
Those are interesting points! Regarding autonomous car technology, since there's so many people working on it, it seems like it may get commoditized soon. If that's the case, being an OEM that supplies the car sharing networks seems like a low margin business, owning the customer relationship is likely to be more profitable. the operational chops to run an efficient fleet might be in shorter supply...
right, uber might have to shutdown its autonomous car program, or it may just settle with google and move on with life...
Uber has a proper license to run in sf again
Uber is absolutely a risky bet. But if they succeed, they may eclipse the car ownership market and get 10x bigger
* Be able to chose the car for your immediate present needs (car/truck/sport)
* Have a car anywhere in the world
* Save money as you no longer need private parking space in your property.
Also most likely the cost of private car ownership is likely going to increase to the domain of luxury.
First because car manufacturer will want a piece of the fleet pie (see Volvo) and that will be a disputed market between Manufacturer/Uber-like/Rental Companies.
Then government are going to like fleets. Working with a few large partners is going to make stuff like dynamic traffic management doable, cities will be able to enforce very strict policies, and minimise the space allocated to car. For example in the EU they are destroying public parking space in the cities, do not allow building of private parking space either for offices or houses.
So car manufacturer won't want to sell you car and government won't want you to own one - good luck :-)
reply