41–50 of 116 posts
> The traditional, reliable cycle of a new wave of teenagers getting their driver’s licenses and buying cars is shrinking. Are these teenagers buying new cars in the room with us now?
Maybe if the venture capitalists private equity, and their billionaire handlers didn’t fuck around with every industry that working people depend on. Then maybe the flow of goods would continue.
Maybe if C-level idiots invested profits into the companies rather than in short term gains (ie, stock buybacks). Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation where a collective If we had a government that actually cared about the welfare of its citizens, we wouldn’t have to depend on companies that enshittify their products and betray their founding principles. Imagine an ecosystem where you didn’t have to force yourself to go to a shitty job you hate because you depend on it for healthcare (fuck private health insurance), an income, and other needs.
America is the richest country in the world yet a majority of citizens are pushed to the brink of poverty despite working 40+ hrs.
The idea that that a huge number of people will give up their private cars for robot-taxis in the next 20 years is laughable. They don't even exist in the vast majority of the country, and it's not even clear that they can function everywhere with our current technology. In just the past year we've seen how the technology we have today is still struggling with how to properly deal with basic things like red traffic lights and school buses.
They haven't even come close to replacing the private cars in the few areas where they do operate. Most people like to be able to go wherever they want whenever they want without begging someone else to come and get them then waiting around for the ride to show up. They like to keep stuff in their cars. They like not having to worry about availability or surge pricing/price gouging or that a lost phone or dead battery or broken app will leave them stranded. If anything will keep Americans from buying new cars it will be because they can't afford them. You can bet it won't be the sudden popularity of "Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft"!
One reason I'm starting to see turn people away from new cars are the anti-features. My next new car will already be an old car because I don't want a camera recording my face the entire time I drive, or microphones recording my conversations, or basic controls buried in touchscreen menus, or features that cause my car to brake unexpectedly or jerk the wheel suddenly from under my hands, or make me pay a monthly subscription fee for anything. I don't want a car that gets software updates over the air. I don't want it internet connected at all. I want my car to work for me and do what I tell it to do.
You sell less to people living in the cities but maybe you sell more to the operators of fleets of rental cars, even self driving if that really becomes mainstream. Not enough to match the decrease of sales. You keep selling to people living in countryside, where you don't go anywhere without a car and where fleets of cars would have to be very large to be able to cover the territory in a meaningful way. There will b…
People in cities decided they wanted less car-centric infrastructure. People in cities demanded EVs, yet didn't show up to keep buying them. People in cities apparently know best what car companies should build, yet they don't buy the cars. Car companies build for suburbanites. Suburbanites buy cars.
And for $100, where are the majority of consumers often located
Eventually, the truth will emerge, possibly with the collapse of the auto subprime loans and the car financing industry.
But what to do?
Don’t build factory capacity and manifest decline? Not likely.
They’re betting success will find a way and those factories will be needed. It’s all they can really do.
"Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft are on track to provide urban air transit within the next few years, targeting the high-margin commuters who traditionally buy premium vehicles." Okay. So... flying cars? Don't think so. Robotaxis make sense where taxis make sense and you can get by without a car already. The demographic decline is real.
The idea that they would be common enough to seriously disrupt "personal transport", even restricting to the "premium" market as it's known today is crazy. Imagine a fancy party where every 10 seconds everyone on the red carpet is being blown away by the backwash of someone landing - also disrupting everyone else trying to land there at the same time.
Because a single autonomous vehicle operating in a shared fleet can replace multiple privately owned cars, the widespread adoption of this technology can’t help but reduce new-car sales volumes. The old "Thing will become more useful so we'll make less of it" argument. No mention of Jevons Paradox? If we can travel and send stuff around from point A to point B cheaply and instantly by dropping ourselves or an item in…
I doubt that here. Cars are already near saturation, at least in the US. Essentially everyone has a car. The car is mostly idle. If car availability starts to approach instant then people don't need personal vehicles that are idle 95% of the time. Car quantity overall goes down unless you can 20x current utilization, which is a lot of trips and fuel. Not to mention that if anything resembling current quantity of exta…
Pretty much every self-driving car will be electric; battery charge has a very different set of considerations than fuel tanks do.
You sell less to people living in the cities but maybe you sell more to the operators of fleets of rental cars, even self driving if that really becomes mainstream. Not enough to match the decrease of sales. You keep selling to people living in countryside, where you don't go anywhere without a car and where fleets of cars would have to be very large to be able to cover the territory in a meaningful way. There will b…
People in cities decided they wanted less car-centric infrastructure. People in cities demanded EVs, yet didn't show up to keep buying them. People in cities apparently know best what car companies should build, yet they don't buy the cars. Car companies build for suburbanites. Suburbanites buy cars.
Very few cities in the us are actively anti car, and the ones that are, are dense enough that vehicle emissions are a local problem for them.
We’re not demanding evs for ourselves, we’re demanding gas cars stop gassing our homes. You want to drive a v8 dually? Great, go nuts! Keep it out of SF!