6 ms·

I can picture all of those things happening to some extent and still would only estimate a 3-5x reduction in fleet size. In order to get 10x, you are implicitly

I can picture all of those things happening to some extent and still would only estimate a 3-5x reduction in fleet size. In order to get 10x, you are implicitly estimating that rush hour vehicle utilization is currently only 10%. I would estimate that rush hour utilization is in the range of 50-70%. For 10x, you would absolutely have to do something to address peak time behavior. For example, if Mom, Dad, and Junior all have to be somewhere at the same time, you are still gonna need 3 vehicles. In aggregate, total fleet demand will be dictated by the marginal demand at the peak of rush hours. EDIT: to add, I would still predict a massive move of car ownership toward corporations, and their primary domicile to large parking lots in outer suburbs, only to awake during rush hours. These cars will have a much lower return on investment, but probably enough to justify their costs.

axplusb 11y ago
How about Mom, Dad, and Junior share rides with other Moms, Dads, and Juniors who are headed in the same direction?
- somerandomone 11y ago
  Yeah, but they usually don't originate from the same location. So instead of matching destination, now you have to match destination and departure location.
  - mrgordon 11y ago
    Yep this is how Lyft Line already works
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  Because that is already a possibility (carpooling is an established idea), and the critical reasons why it isn't more popular don't significantly change with automated cars. People don't want to spend their commute with random people who just happen to be going the same direction. Perhaps more important is that it creates a strict commitment to be prepared to leave on time and a reliance on others leaving on time.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    > People don't want to spend their commute with random people who just happen to be going the same direction Many, many people already do this on public transport. What we're talking about is general door-to-door public transport. Car-pooling is awkward to arrange, particularly for short joined parts of the journey (e.g. picking someone up part way and dropping them off a little later), and it's extremely hard to arrange anything that overlaps such that the first passenger needs to get out before the last passenger (currently would involve handing over the keys to your car).
    - MajorLOL 11y ago
      >Many, many people already do this on public transport Total fantasy. Virtually nobody uses public transport. 5% of commuters use public transport. Relative to the car-pooling, who sees double the volume of users as public transport, 10%. http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf
      - SEJeff 11y ago
        Guess that depends on where you live. In cities like NYC, or Chicago (where I live), having a car in the city is common, but the minority.
        zevyoura 11y ago
        In the US, only NYC has over half of households without a vehicle [0]. Chicago has only 28% with no vehicle. [0] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/21923-hitchin-a-ride-fewer-americans-have-their-own-vehicle http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/21923-hitchin-a-ride-fewer-...
      - astrange 11y ago
        How many people use public transit in Europe, or Japan and Korea?
        11y ago
- ogrisel 11y ago
  Self-driving mini-vans could lie in the car / public bus & subway trade-off on high traffic commute roads. car: high flexibility, high cost public transport: low flexibility (last mile, connections, fixed time schedule), lower cost self-driving vans: medium flexibility, possibly low cost.
GoLocalApps 11y ago
You only need the three cars if you insist on owning the vehicle you're riding it. So if Mom, Dad and Kid all need to be somewhere different at the same time, Uber Pool could work for two of the three, or all three while the car is earning more as Uber Black (or the future equivalent). They only need their own vehicle if they want to ride together.
- saosebastiao 11y ago
  If Mom, Dad, and Kid need to be in different places at the same time during peak travel time, there is still a demand for 3 vehicles regardless of who owns them. The effect on total vehicle fleet is unchanged. The better pooling effects of subscription or on-demand fleets mitigate this problem in most scenarios, but it doesn't mitigate it during peak times. Peak vehicle utilization will be what drives total vehicle fleet size.
  - mrgordon 11y ago
    Even if the members of the family are going different places, each of them can likely share a car with other people heading in the same direction (e.g. to the same school or workplace, to the same city from the suburbs, etc.)
    - saosebastiao 11y ago
      The same capability currently exists independently of driverless cars. What makes you think the utilization of this tactic will change with driverless cars?
      - biot 11y ago
        Coordinating this is a hassle. With driverless cars, you could say "I need a vehicle to take me from A to B" and a vehicle just shows up, possibly with one or more passengers who were already enroute to B. It wouldn't surprise me if that becomes the norm with an option for "I require a private trip" for an extra fee.
JumpCrisscross 11y ago
> would only estimate a 3-5x reduction in fleet size 10x is admittedly bullish. I expect 4 to 7x within 20 years, i.e. 3 to 4 product cycles. But 10x is more reasonable than it seems at face value. Let's use Manhattan to illustrate. Another HN user (wadenick) kindly provided [1] some references I'd like to point to. Car ownership across the United States stands at 81% of households [2]. In Manhattan it's 23% [3]. Manhattan has roughly fewer than 1/3 the number of cars as the rest of America. This is partly why there are only 39 gas stations in Manhattan (down from 60 in 2004) [4]. Repair shops, too, are fewer and further in between. Many are owned by taxi operators for their fleets' use only. Uber pays 75% of its earnings to its drivers. How much cheaper could a driverless be? 50% less? How would that tilt our 23% figure? All it takes is half of Manhattan's car-owning households to switch for Manhattan to hit a 7-fold reduction in car ownership from present-day America. Everywhere isn't Manhattan. Density matters. Less-dense locales will need to accept some combination of higher wait times, higher prices or lower rates of fleet reduction. That said, the scaling economics are nearly identical. Fleets will be cheaper than individually-owned self-driving cars because they can more efficiently use their down time. This, in turn, makes individually car ownership more expensive (by degrading retail-servicing infrastructure and supply chains). That, in turn, makes fleet usage more desirable and so on. The degree to which this happens may vary. But at its lower bound, I'd posit 4x and at its higher bound over 10. Given that income and urban dwelling are correlated, and continue to increase in their correlation, that bodes badly for the edge-case rural families demanding high degrees of simultaneity at a price even remotely approaching what it costs to maintain a small garage of cars today. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837732 [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20140209114811/http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.VEH.NVEH.P3 http://web.archive.org/web/20140209114811/http://data.worldb... [3] http://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-cars http://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-cars [4] http://www.wnyc.org/story/say-goodbye-manhattans-gas-stations-heres-map/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/say-goodbye-manhattans-gas-station...
- JonFish85 11y ago
  "Uber pays 75% of its earnings to its drivers. How much cheaper could a driverless be? 50% less?" Remember that from that 75% is supposed to be things like insurance policies and such, and I suspect that currently drivers aren't bothering to properly insure their cars (using it for a business rather than personal use). In a driverless car case, someone is going to have to pay for that insurance, whether the manufacturer, operator or rider, that cost is going to come from someplace, and will probably be significant. I'm not sure that you could achieve 50% savings, and maybe not even 25%. "All it takes is half of Manhattan's car-owning households to switch for Manhattan to hit a 7-fold reduction in car ownership from present-day America." But what does that prove? Manhattan isn't a great barometer of anything. Even if they did drop to 14% or so, that's not really moving the needle much either way, is it?

axplusb 11y ago

How about Mom, Dad, and Junior share rides with other Moms, Dads, and Juniors who are headed in the same direction?

somerandomone 11y ago
Yeah, but they usually don't originate from the same location. So instead of matching destination, now you have to match destination and departure location.
- mrgordon 11y ago
  Yep this is how Lyft Line already works
BookmarkSaver 11y ago
Because that is already a possibility (carpooling is an established idea), and the critical reasons why it isn't more popular don't significantly change with automated cars. People don't want to spend their commute with random people who just happen to be going the same direction. Perhaps more important is that it creates a strict commitment to be prepared to leave on time and a reliance on others leaving on time.
- IanCal 11y ago
  > People don't want to spend their commute with random people who just happen to be going the same direction Many, many people already do this on public transport. What we're talking about is general door-to-door public transport. Car-pooling is awkward to arrange, particularly for short joined parts of the journey (e.g. picking someone up part way and dropping them off a little later), and it's extremely hard to arrange anything that overlaps such that the first passenger needs to get out before the last passenger (currently would involve handing over the keys to your car).
  - MajorLOL 11y ago
    >Many, many people already do this on public transport Total fantasy. Virtually nobody uses public transport. 5% of commuters use public transport. Relative to the car-pooling, who sees double the volume of users as public transport, 10%. http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf
    - SEJeff 11y ago
      Guess that depends on where you live. In cities like NYC, or Chicago (where I live), having a car in the city is common, but the minority.
      - zevyoura 11y ago
        In the US, only NYC has over half of households without a vehicle [0]. Chicago has only 28% with no vehicle. [0] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/21923-hitchin-a-ride-fewer-americans-have-their-own-vehicle http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/21923-hitchin-a-ride-fewer-...
    - astrange 11y ago
      How many people use public transit in Europe, or Japan and Korea?
      - 11y ago
ogrisel 11y ago
Self-driving mini-vans could lie in the car / public bus & subway trade-off on high traffic commute roads. car: high flexibility, high cost public transport: low flexibility (last mile, connections, fixed time schedule), lower cost self-driving vans: medium flexibility, possibly low cost.

GoLocalApps 11y ago

You only need the three cars if you insist on owning the vehicle you're riding it. So if Mom, Dad and Kid all need to be somewhere different at the same time, Uber Pool could work for two of the three, or all three while the car is earning more as Uber Black (or the future equivalent). They only need their own vehicle if they want to ride together.

saosebastiao 11y ago
If Mom, Dad, and Kid need to be in different places at the same time during peak travel time, there is still a demand for 3 vehicles regardless of who owns them. The effect on total vehicle fleet is unchanged. The better pooling effects of subscription or on-demand fleets mitigate this problem in most scenarios, but it doesn't mitigate it during peak times. Peak vehicle utilization will be what drives total vehicle fleet size.
- mrgordon 11y ago
  Even if the members of the family are going different places, each of them can likely share a car with other people heading in the same direction (e.g. to the same school or workplace, to the same city from the suburbs, etc.)
  - saosebastiao 11y ago
    The same capability currently exists independently of driverless cars. What makes you think the utilization of this tactic will change with driverless cars?
    - biot 11y ago
      Coordinating this is a hassle. With driverless cars, you could say "I need a vehicle to take me from A to B" and a vehicle just shows up, possibly with one or more passengers who were already enroute to B. It wouldn't surprise me if that becomes the norm with an option for "I require a private trip" for an extra fee.

JumpCrisscross 11y ago

> would only estimate a 3-5x reduction in fleet size 10x is admittedly bullish. I expect 4 to 7x within 20 years, i.e. 3 to 4 product cycles. But 10x is more reasonable than it seems at face value. Let's use Manhattan to illustrate. Another HN user (wadenick) kindly provided [1] some references I'd like to point to. Car ownership across the United States stands at 81% of households [2]. In Manhattan it's 23% [3]. Manhattan has roughly fewer than 1/3 the number of cars as the rest of America. This is partly why there are only 39 gas stations in Manhattan (down from 60 in 2004) [4]. Repair shops, too, are fewer and further in between. Many are owned by taxi operators for their fleets' use only. Uber pays 75% of its earnings to its drivers. How much cheaper could a driverless be? 50% less? How would that tilt our 23% figure? All it takes is half of Manhattan's car-owning households to switch for Manhattan to hit a 7-fold reduction in car ownership from present-day America. Everywhere isn't Manhattan. Density matters. Less-dense locales will need to accept some combination of higher wait times, higher prices or lower rates of fleet reduction. That said, the scaling economics are nearly identical. Fleets will be cheaper than individually-owned self-driving cars because they can more efficiently use their down time. This, in turn, makes individually car ownership more expensive (by degrading retail-servicing infrastructure and supply chains). That, in turn, makes fleet usage more desirable and so on. The degree to which this happens may vary. But at its lower bound, I'd posit 4x and at its higher bound over 10. Given that income and urban dwelling are correlated, and continue to increase in their correlation, that bodes badly for the edge-case rural families demanding high degrees of simultaneity at a price even remotely approaching what it costs to maintain a small garage of cars today. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837732 [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20140209114811/http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.VEH.NVEH.P3 http://web.archive.org/web/20140209114811/http://data.worldb... [3] http://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-cars http://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-cars [4] http://www.wnyc.org/story/say-goodbye-manhattans-gas-stations-heres-map/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/say-goodbye-manhattans-gas-station...

JonFish85 11y ago
"Uber pays 75% of its earnings to its drivers. How much cheaper could a driverless be? 50% less?" Remember that from that 75% is supposed to be things like insurance policies and such, and I suspect that currently drivers aren't bothering to properly insure their cars (using it for a business rather than personal use). In a driverless car case, someone is going to have to pay for that insurance, whether the manufacturer, operator or rider, that cost is going to come from someplace, and will probably be significant. I'm not sure that you could achieve 50% savings, and maybe not even 25%. "All it takes is half of Manhattan's car-owning households to switch for Manhattan to hit a 7-fold reduction in car ownership from present-day America." But what does that prove? Manhattan isn't a great barometer of anything. Even if they did drop to 14% or so, that's not really moving the needle much either way, is it?