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>(Note: people already do this in cities like New York, where car ownership is relatively scarce.) Car ownership is 45% in NYC. Not sure why this is considered "scarce" :)
According to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_... ), the jump from NYC (56% car free) to the next most car-free city (38%, Washington DC) is pretty massive.
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They will still need a chassis/engine before they have a viable car, and there's been no real external indication of them either developing that in house or partnering with/purchasing someone that can provide that expertise. .. at least I think that's what the question is about.
Uber planned to buy 2,500 driverless cars from Google (GX3200, investment of $375m), announced back in 2013 [1] [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/uberauto/
Edit: Apparently the point was to test what rebloggers would believe: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/27/uber_goog...
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Yes, Edison who also invented the lightbulb, phonograph, motion pictures, carbon microphone, fuel cell, stock ticker, and alkaline battery.
I'm far from an expert on all of the details, but I find it amusing how similar Edison was to Steve Jobs: both non-engineers that seemed to have enough technical intuition to facilitate an amazing amount of development within their organizations, all while taking (perhaps) more credit than they deserved and running their businesses in occasionally ruthless ways. Yet, somehow it's popular to want to emulate Steve Jobs…
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I can't see the opportunity for them, on the other hand I can see the threat, if autonomous cars become ubiquitous then why would you bother owning your own? Also if rental becomes the dominant model then customers aren't going to worry so much about those expensive extras where car manufacturers make their profits.
>autonomous cars become ubiquitous then why would you bother owning your own? Anything requiring a truck (60% of new vehicle sales) will not be something that you use as a automated vehicle that is for rent. You really are ok with ordering up a driverless car that I will take off-road and load up with scrap materials from a house remodel and send off, driverless down the road with my trash hanging out the back? I rea…
But almost no one rents a mower. Why not? Is it possible that the convenience is worth paying for,even if it can be delivered to your door? Is it that knowing that it's ready for use exactly when you need it is important? You'd think a few people in each neighborhood would just do a group buy into a high-end mower that could do the job in half the time and they'd all share it. This rarely happens (only time I've seen this behavior is farmers sharing expensive equipment).
My gut tells me the self-driving/car sharing revolution is going to take a bit longer than HN expects.
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I'm far from an expert on all of the details, but I find it amusing how similar Edison was to Steve Jobs: both non-engineers that seemed to have enough technical intuition to facilitate an amazing amount of development within their organizations, all while taking (perhaps) more credit than they deserved and running their businesses in occasionally ruthless ways. Yet, somehow it's popular to want to emulate Steve Jobs…
Perhaps this is because there is no (obvious/singular) Tesla to Jobs' Edison.
I like Lyft quite a lot as a company. However, partnering with another company is often a bad sign. It means Lyft needs more cash and isn't able to innovate enough on its own to survive in the market. Additionally, $500 million to "work on developing a so-called autonomous on-demand network of self-driving cars" is a demoralizing statement. 500m is not enough to complete this goal, especially for such a large company…
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Surely it reduces the total number of cars, though? The vast majority of cars spend most of their time idle. With this model, you could supply the same total need with many fewer vehicles. Unless GM owns the whole fleet and Jacks up the price, losing that much demand strikes me as pretty rough.
Better to capture the biggest share of the smaller pie than to ignore the sea change. Blockbuster ignored a similar shift bcause it wasn't as profitable. Plus the downshift won't be as great as some predict. You'll still need enough cars for long commutes. And cars lifespan are measured in miles not years. Autonomous cars might actually increase the number of miles driven (commute while sleeping, alternative to publi…
The single most obvious point that everyone seems to be ignoring!
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>(Note: people already do this in cities like New York, where car ownership is relatively scarce.) Car ownership is 45% in NYC. Not sure why this is considered "scarce" :)
In Manhattan it's 23% ( http://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-cars ). This is quite scarce relative to the rest of the USA and indeed even relative to the suburban boroughs of the greater New York City metro area. For the US the last average I saw (World Bank data http://web.archive.org/web/20140209114811/http://data.worldb... ) was 81%.
How much cheaper would a driverless Lyft or taxi be? 50%? How many more people would forego driving, in Manhattan, if ridesharing were half as expensive as it is today? If half do we're at 11.5% car ownership, a 7-fold reduction from the present-day U.S. average. If 2/3 do, we get to 10-fold.
It is predicted that autonomous cars will reduce America's fleet of vehicles by something like 10-fold [1]. I think it will unfold something like this: FIRST, instead three cars for mom, dad and kid, the average family has one car that drops mom off to work, then dad, and then the teen off to school. SECOND, aforementioned car makes use of its down time to drive strangers around via Uber, Lyft, et cetera. The car's o…
1. Mom, dad, and kid all need to go to work/school at roughly the same time. If they all have a 15-20 minute commute (well below average for many areas) and the destinations for all three aren't in the same immediate vicinity, we're right back to the family needing 2-3 cars.
2. Eh, no. Go to the mall or a shopping center parking lot and walk around looking in people's cars. The average person's car is somewhere between messy and a pigsty. IMO, this will only get worse with SDCs, since people will be able to do more eating/dressing/preparing/relaxing in their car without the need to drive. Not to mention the number of people who simply don't want random strangers using their car. Uber or Lyft would have to offer a significant fee before I would even consider it.
3. Vehicle owners are used to convenience. If I live in 20 minutes outside the city, then I probably have to wait 20-30 minutes for a ride to arrive before I even start my trip. Massively inconvenient, and not worth it.
SDCs will definitely lead to change in American society, but I have to wonder if it won't completely backfire on some of these expectations, and actually lead to American society sprawling out even more into the suburban and rural areas. WFH is becoming a viable option for more and more jobs, and longer commutes will be much more acceptable to most people when the time in their car isn't simply lost time.
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>(Note: people already do this in cities like New York, where car ownership is relatively scarce.) Car ownership is 45% in NYC. Not sure why this is considered "scarce" :)
It's probably also worth noting that a lot of the time when people say "NYC," they really mean Manhattan--and, more specifically, they're really thinking Manhattan below 110th Street or so. I imagine the number is significantly lower if you remove the other boroughs.