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Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

economist.com

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Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#91

Post by ghaff »

Retric wrote: post #85
ghaff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why isn't that being done today? As you increase the number of passengers, the cost of the driver becomes relatively trivial. It seems as if this were a service people were willing to pay for these money-losing companies are missing a significant market opportunity. I know there's UberPool but as far as I can tell it isn't a wildly popular option.

Routing. Turning an efficient set of start > points to a combined path is a complex traveling salesman problem. But this is worse as you need to find multiple such sets from raw data. It's not hard to get some overlap but if you go past 2-3 passengers everyone gets a longer trip.

That's probably true. Plus a lot of people just don't want to share vehicles. At some point, you're basically creating most of the disadvantages of a bus in a smaller vehicle.

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#92

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

baron816 wrote: post #12

If I had to choose between a world where 1) everyone owned electric cars 2) no one owned cars but just hitched rides on autonomous ones and 3) no one used cars at all, I would take the third option. I think it's possible if we start building new cities designed for walking, instead of just expanding our current cities, with all the problems that presents. I think the trick would be to strictly limit their footprint t…

I've lived in Rome. It's basically like that. Everything you need is within a 3-4 block radius. It was very pleasant and I only rarely needed public transportation, and never a car.

Groceries were a total pain in the ass, every time.

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#93

Post by mikeash »

baron816 wrote: post #70
mikeash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see a city with the third option, but the whole world? What if you want to go someplace that isn't in a city? Public transportation can't cover every rural destination.

Sorry if I gave the impression that I want to make everyone live there. I don't want to make anyone do anything they don't want to do.

Gotcha. I took "a world" literally, but guess I shouldn't have.

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#94

Post by ghaff »

bwanab wrote: post #41
bryanlarsen wrote: post #2

Anytime you make something cheaper, easier to use, more useful and/or more efficient you get an increase in usage. Autonomous electric cars are all 4, and will lead to a dramatic increase in the number of miles driven. Some of those miles we can imagine (for instance sending your car on a dead-head journey somewhere for somebody else to use it), but most of the increase will probably be from new usage models that we…

Congestion? I don't think you're taking into account the huge advantage that autonomous cars have with respect to coordination among themselves. Much, if not most, congestion is caused by human drivers attempting to accrue advantage to themselves through maneuvers that disadvantage everybody else on the road.

Possibly but it's unlikely you get a lot of that benefit while you have a mix of people and computers driving. So many many decades out.

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#95

Post by NegativeLatency »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #89
stcredzero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry that self-driving cars are going to be used as an excuse not to expand public transit, especially in the Bay Area. By reducing people's sunk cost in cars, it may well free up the public mind to alternative forms of transportation. A lot of political inertia comes in the form of personal sunk costs. Also, self driving vehicles could themselves be used to expand public transit. IIRC, In Portland in the 90's, th…

> By reducing people's sunk cost in cars I love this conversation. The US new auto sales run rate is ~17 million vehicles/year, with an average price right around $35k. That's $595,000,000,000 per year in capital being allocated to automotive mobility alone . Think what better things we could do with that capital (or everyone could work far less!) if we only spent a fraction of that on automotive capital costs.

Don't forget maintenance, insurance, and gas costs

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#96

Post by pjc50 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #2

Anytime you make something cheaper, easier to use, more useful and/or more efficient you get an increase in usage. Autonomous electric cars are all 4, and will lead to a dramatic increase in the number of miles driven. Some of those miles we can imagine (for instance sending your car on a dead-head journey somewhere for somebody else to use it), but most of the increase will probably be from new usage models that we…

At the moment electrics have lower marginal cost but much higher capital cost. That implies the average miles per car has to go up in order for them to make sense ...

The capability of "autonomous" is also overstated - at the moment there aren't the Level 6 autonomous cars that would be capable of dead-head journeys.

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#97

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Aron wrote: post #69
seibelj wrote: post #6

You don't realize it until you focus on it, but walking around a city, even a relatively clean one like Boston, how much of the air is full of exhaust. City busses that don't run on natural gas spew huge amounts of black smoke, it's disgusting. I can't wait until electric cars take over, the air is going to be so much cleaner, even in dense urban environments.

I have a theory that people will treat gas cars like they treated smokers. There was a stretch of time where smoking was popular in restaurants but the common shtick was the table next to you would go 'ewww!' and wave their hands around their nose or faux-cough causing all kinds of conflict and pressure. Pedestrians at stop signs might do the same for ICEs, etc.

>Pedestrians at stop signs might do the same for ICEs, etc.

Two groups of people will drive ICEs in that future. Poor people who are still driving 2023 Camrys and rich people driving higher end or enthusiast target ICE stuff.

More than a few in the latter group will consider such an attempt at shaming them as an invitation to spin the tires all the way through the intersection when the light turns green. Tire smoke smells bad to most people.

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#98

Post by JoshTriplett »

baron816 wrote: post #12

If I had to choose between a world where 1) everyone owned electric cars 2) no one owned cars but just hitched rides on autonomous ones and 3) no one used cars at all, I would take the third option. I think it's possible if we start building new cities designed for walking, instead of just expanding our current cities, with all the problems that presents. I think the trick would be to strictly limit their footprint t…

That would also make the city completely inaccessible to people who can't walk those distances. The elderly, the disabled, the temporarily injured, etc. You'd also drastically increase commute times for the average person; a distance that takes 5 minutes to drive can take 30-60 to walk, and that's a huge amount of time wasted. (Not everyone can live within a few minutes walking distance of their workplace.) If you're talking about not having roads at all, you'd also break things like shipping and package delivery, other types of deliveries, trucking in general, many aspects of emergency services, and so on. Or just the ability to go pick up large/bulky items.

I'd love to see designs that rely less on cars as a sole means of transportation. They still have a place in the ecosystem, however, and they serve a useful function.

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#99

Post by kjksf »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #75
bryanlarsen wrote: post #2

Anytime you make something cheaper, easier to use, more useful and/or more efficient you get an increase in usage. Autonomous electric cars are all 4, and will lead to a dramatic increase in the number of miles driven. Some of those miles we can imagine (for instance sending your car on a dead-head journey somewhere for somebody else to use it), but most of the increase will probably be from new usage models that we…

Yeah I don't understand this enthusiasm for autonomous cars. It seems like the HN-crowd seems to wax enthusiasm for solutions that don't yet exist, and absolutely reject alternatives (bikes, public transit) that already exist and work. With new solutions comes new problems, and I can see congestion being a big one. I guess it's not sexy to implement the tried-and-true, but it's a lot more sexy to dream.

The technology for autonomous cars does exist. Latest data from Waymo is that they can drive 5.000 miles on average before disengagement (https://medium.com/waymo/accelerating-the-pace-of-learning-3...).

They are not ready to be widely deployed but are close, which is why we're talking about them. It's an exciting technology with great potential impact on the future and a lot of that impact is positive.

As far as bikes go: no one is complaining about them. It's all in your mind.

As far as public transit: autonomous cars will improve it. By my calculations, autonomous car will be cheaper, unsubsidized, than a $2.50 bus ride subsidized by the city from our taxes (SF has ~$1 billion budget to fund money-loosing bart, buses etc.).

And that's cars. Things will be even cheaper if we get buses to be autonomous. At which point it's likely bus service will be cheaper and provided by a commercial company (the only reason public transport is government owned is because it looses money, so it wouldn't exist as private company).

Re: Electric cars: The death of the internal combustion engine

#100

Post by ghaff »

falcolas wrote: post #68
poopchute wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about it the same way as owning a boat. If you go fishing every weekend then by all means buy a boat. If you only go once a year for a weekend then just rent a boat. Same principal can be used for longer than 650 km drives

Probably the easiest answer. Not necessarily with the current car rental prices (it immediately adds $300-400 to the cost of a vacation), but overall a decent model.

Not sure why they would get a lot cheaper than they are today. For people who live in a place like NYC, it's pretty common to not own a car and just rent one when they go skiing or whatever. The driving factor tends to be not so much the cost of owning a car but the costs associated with keeping one (parking, etc.) in a place like Manhattan.
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