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> The automobile industry will contract as we move from individual ownership to mobility. What does this even mean? People like to leave stuff in their cars (

> The automobile industry will contract as we move from individual ownership to mobility. What does this even mean? People like to leave stuff in their cars (e.g. mug, gym bag). They like them to be at their preferred level of cleanliness or disorder. Some even use them as a means of personal expression. If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market.

bluGill 10y ago
Exactly. I like knowing that there are extra diapers and a change of clothing for each kid in my car should I need them. I carry enough in to cover my current needs, but as anyone with kids known sometimes that isn't enough. I know many people who keep golf clubs in their car because sometimes a salesman is looking to round out a 4-some. I like going to walmart/lowes... over lunch and leaving my treasures in my car. Car sharing won't actually work out anyway because everyone needs their car during rush hour. Everyone is driving then anyway, and then the cars sit idle.
- moftz 10y ago
  The car sharing won't cover everyone's needs and some people will stick to keeping their own car. I'd imagine people living in urban areas are more likely to use a car sharing service since it's uneconomical to own a car in most cities. I'd imagine the suburbs will be a mix of sharing and ownership. I can imagine a family having a car they keep for weekends or whenever the parents and kids need to go somewhere but they still use a car sharing service during the weekdays when mom takes the family car to work and dad need to get to work too.
  - Tenhundfeld 10y ago
    I think you're exactly right. Once cars can drive themselves to destinations, it becomes so much easier to get by with one dedicated family car, supplemented with car sharing services. For example: Mom takes service to work, possibly carpooling. Dad takes uses family car to drop off kids and goes to work. Car drives itself to mom's work for her to use to pick up kids and commute home. Dad takes service home. Or whatever. The point is kids can always be in the car with the extra diapers, with safety features parents want, etc. The other part of this that people ignore is that a car sharing service could open up a lot of flexibility. For example, maybe our dedicated family car is just a sedan, but on this particular weekend with the grandparents in town, we can use the car sharing service to get a minivan and have everyone ride together. Or I want to pick up a piece of furniture and request a truck from the service. Or it's my anniversary, and I can request a luxury sedan to drive us to the restaurant for a touch of opulence. I'm sure there are many other examples people can think of. Like you say, car sharing won't cover everyone's need, especially at first, but eventually, the big players in the space will have enough sophistication to cover many cases, especially for a second car.
  - vectorjohn 10y ago
    I think car sharing even works in those cases. It's all a logistical problem. Not that there won't be some people who own cars. There just aren't that many problems that are hard to solve with car shares to outweigh the huge benefits.
  - bluGill 10y ago
    car sharing works less well for getting to work because everyone else is trying to get to work then. You may as well own your own car for getting to work because you pay for all the costs anyway. All car sharing buys you is fixed maintenance costs on your car. Car sharing starts to make sense when you want the car outside of rush hour. Want to go to the store for an hour at 2:30, no problem there are plenty of cars free. Want to get to work every day - you are paying peak rates for a car that will probably be used exactly twice that day, once to get you to work and once to get you home.
- netfire 10y ago
  Car sharing (if self-driven) does provide an additional perk--time and money saved trying to find a place to park and paying for that parking. In addition, people turning into parking lots/garages (or worse parallel parking) interrupt the flow of traffic, making congestion worse. There's also many other potential improvements that self-driving cars could use to reduce congestion (faster speeds, reaction times, communication between cars, etc) and greatly lessen the commute during peak times
- Arelius 10y ago
  "Rush hour" is actually a pretty long distribution of time compared to the average length of a person's commute. I imagine just considering commuting, you could likely get close to half the amount of cars required with car-sharing, since you may get in at 7:30 and I may get in at 9:00. And you could provide good price incentives to convince people to mix up their commute times a bit. I already know people who push their times significantly to avoid traffic just due to the stress aspect.
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    This seems as good a place as any to add the familiar lament: Why does no one build new commuter rail in this country? (This assumes that you're also from the US, for rhetorical convenience.)
    - bad_hairpiece 10y ago
      I think it comes down to cost. Its only effective in very dense areas. For example, right now I'm on an established commuter rail line going from downtown to a suburb. I'm paying $12 round trip to travel 60 miles total. It's just barely cheaper than driving (not including parking expenses). At this point in time, I think it's wise to avoid laying costly new tracks with the dawn of driverless cars on the horizon.
      - clock_tower 10y ago
        I think there are physical reasons why driverless cars will never be as good as trains: they're rubber-on-asphalt instead of steel-on-steel, and you need a lot more engines, space, and transportation of dead weight per unit of people moved -- and they'll probably still need parking, too. As near as I can tell, driverless cars are horseless-carriage thinking... but trains have no element of novelty to them.
        vectorjohn 10y ago
        Driverless cars can take you between train stations and destinations. No magical form of train will come to your house or go to your office. In fact, this is a perfect use case for driverless cars. The problem with trains everywhere is the wasted time not on the train and the million stops along the way.
- vectorjohn 10y ago
  Wow, so for the short time you have kids in diapers this won't work for you personally. Big whoop. We still have typewriters around too, and some people ride horses. Old tech doesn't die, it just diminishes to a smaller niche.
  - marchenko 10y ago
    "Diapers" is just a synecdoche for parenting equipment: diapers, wipes, books, snacks for older kids, extra changes of clothing, etc. Car seats will be a bigger problem: they are unwieldy, legally mandated, and require careful installation to be effective. Unlike diapers, even the small boosters used for older children can't fit in a shoulder bag. A young couple expecting to have children in the next few years might balk at these inconveniences, and that could depress adoption of the 'mobility' model. You have to keep prospective purchasers in mind, who are evaluating their needs over the use-life of a car.
criley2 10y ago
I find it shocking that something as simple as personal belongings would be a "lock in" to existing technology. It's like saying "I prefer my horse, I can feed it grass off the side of the road, but you have to find some fancy petro-chemical station for your auto-mobile? Insane! My gas grows next to the road!" I get it, but try to put yourself in the place of someone younger who doesn't make decisions like "I would never replace my car because I keep spare diapers there!" >If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market. This is very Bill Gates "no one would ever need more than ..." argument. Come on!! ZipCar has literally nothing on the future of mobility. You (and many people your age, conditioned from birth to place massive value on personal car ownership) may never move past that paradigm. You might go to your grave in 50 years a proud owner of a vehicle in an era where almost no one owns. I think, instead of sagely predicting failure, maybe try creativity, use that entrepreneurial mindset to solve future challenges. You want to keep spare diapers nearby? Why not have a secure storage module in the vehicle, lets say the trunk can be split into 2 or 4 secure storage modules. You order an autonomous electric vehicle to your location, ETA 5 minutes. You hit the "bring my secure storage container to my location" option, restricting the available pool of cars to meet your need to those close to your container, at a small additional fee. Boom, the "insolvable" problem of personal storage in a vehicle is solved by commoditizing the storage and use the AI vehicle to transport it where you need. I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried.
- username223 10y ago
  It's not "personal belongings," it's "personal space." Hot-sheeting happens where sleeping space is extremely limited, like oil drilling camps, but it hasn't taken off among the general population, despite the fact that you only use your bed for around 1/3 of the day. People are willing to pay for their own beds and, frequently, their own apartments or houses, despite the fact that most of that space goes unused most of the time for someone with normal work and sleep schedules. Do you AirBnB your bed (at hourly rates)? Do you AirPantsAndT your clothes? Most people don't. I doubt I'll last another 50 years, but I'll probably live long enough to see the end of the current robot taxi fad.
netfire 10y ago
I think you are generally right about a primary/family car, but less so for a second, commuter car. I think this mainly hinges around making the self-driving technology safe, reliable and cheap (that is, cheaper than owning a car currently). I think taxis would be used more if they were significantly cheaper. Buses and trains have extra delays for stops, and you may still have to walk/bike after you get off. Having a cheap transportation option once you get off the train would probably increase train ridership as well, and decrease congestion during peak hours (at least for the major freeways, it may increase it some on roads closer to the train station)
- willyt 10y ago
  Trains should be faster than cars in dense urban environments (if you are close to the station), e.g. London Euston to Watford 19miles 15-20mins by train 32mins by car (outside rush hour).
  - cjrp 10y ago
    Although you do have to enter the station ~5 mins before the train leaves (allowing time to get through the ticket barrier, walk to the platform, board the train), plus exiting at the other end. My train gets into London Bridge in the morning at :32 but I don't get to the street until :36 because of the sheer volume of people. It seems minor, but it does all add up. That said, in rush hour there's no contest - that same journey would take 1 hour+.
tbabb 10y ago
> The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market. - A personal, individual vehicle which comes to pick you up where you are and take you to exactly where you want to go is a much MUCH higher value proposition than public transit. - Add self-driving to the mix, and the cost of that service will plummet. - When the car providing that service can drive itself, then there is little to no inconvenience to the vehicle owner to offer that service, and significant financial incentive. - Because car owners will be able to make "rent" from their capital investment, owning a car will start to look more like property ownership than a depreciating investment-- especially as maintenance and operation costs fall for electric vehicles. - There will be very strong financial incentive to use self-driving ride pools instead of putting up a large wad of cash to own a car. So total car ownership will go way down, and will be done much more by the wealthy and much less by the working/middle class. - Cost of ownership is especially high in cities (parking), and the market for ride sharing is highest. So probably many fewer city dwellers will own cars. - Families that own can shrink to one car instead of two, since the car can drop people off or pick them up. I think there are a lot of pretty good reasons why the vehicle market is going to change significantly in the next 15 years.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  > Cost of ownership is especially high in cities (parking), and the market for ride sharing is highest. So probably many fewer city dwellers will own cars. If it's really self-driving it can go park wherever. Not very good for the environment, perhaps, but it completely solves that problem.
  - bad_hairpiece 10y ago
    The farther the car goes to park, the longer the wait for it to pick you up on demand. Not to mention, traveling a few blocks rarely saves much on parking in densely populated areas.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      It can travel way further than "a few blocks" and I'd guess most trips are not so unexpected that it's impossible to accept a delay of 30 minutes or maybe even longer.
kpil 10y ago
Exactly. Maybe poor people will take the robocab from hell, with sick on the floor. Most people will not.
- vectorjohn 10y ago
  Uh, what? Cabs are already really popular. Why would a self driving car be "from hell"? You think they can't be cleaned?
- vidarh 10y ago
  Poor people might take "the robocab from hell", but just as I don't order "the humancab from hell" now, but order from the slightly more upscale "clean, air-conditioned high end sedan with blacked out windows and wifi" for just a slightly higher fee, people who earn more will still have alternatives, yet will still benefit from the cost reductions. The difference being that poor people will have the "robocab from hell" alternative rather than have nothing they can afford, and that more people will afford said high end sedan when it's self-driving, and will be able to justify it more often, and more people will afford to trade up to even more luxurious services. There is already a marked class difference in commuting in London: Low paid people take the bus four two hours+ for commutes that'd take less than half that if they could afford the train from the outer fare zones (bus-rides cost the same within the entire London fares area), so transport is already today segregated by income. A lot of the longer bus lines makes no apparent sense until you realise that low paid people often can't afford the train, or a car.
woodpanel 10y ago
This 'switch from ownership to mobility'-buzz is one of the most overvalued ideas recently. Much like the Kindle was supposed to kill the book. Why must some people see new inventions always as colossal destroyers of products they don't like instead of the more humble 'enriching ones freedom to choose'?
- dilemma 10y ago
  They're true believers and their faith is called religion.
- dorgo 10y ago
  Wait. But Kindle killed the book. I stopped buying paper books long time ago.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    I've never bought a Kindle, and the only e-books I own are ones that came free with the purchase of a printed copy.
- vidarh 10y ago
  The kindle may not have killed the book, but it has made a massive dent in the paper-book market, despite substantial problems with e-books. It will likely continue to eat away at it. If self-driving cars has as massive an impact on car ownership as e-books have had on the paper book market, that will be a dramatically noticeable change in most cities.

bluGill 10y ago

Exactly. I like knowing that there are extra diapers and a change of clothing for each kid in my car should I need them. I carry enough in to cover my current needs, but as anyone with kids known sometimes that isn't enough. I know many people who keep golf clubs in their car because sometimes a salesman is looking to round out a 4-some. I like going to walmart/lowes... over lunch and leaving my treasures in my car. Car sharing won't actually work out anyway because everyone needs their car during rush hour. Everyone is driving then anyway, and then the cars sit idle.

moftz 10y ago
The car sharing won't cover everyone's needs and some people will stick to keeping their own car. I'd imagine people living in urban areas are more likely to use a car sharing service since it's uneconomical to own a car in most cities. I'd imagine the suburbs will be a mix of sharing and ownership. I can imagine a family having a car they keep for weekends or whenever the parents and kids need to go somewhere but they still use a car sharing service during the weekdays when mom takes the family car to work and dad need to get to work too.
- Tenhundfeld 10y ago
  I think you're exactly right. Once cars can drive themselves to destinations, it becomes so much easier to get by with one dedicated family car, supplemented with car sharing services. For example: Mom takes service to work, possibly carpooling. Dad takes uses family car to drop off kids and goes to work. Car drives itself to mom's work for her to use to pick up kids and commute home. Dad takes service home. Or whatever. The point is kids can always be in the car with the extra diapers, with safety features parents want, etc. The other part of this that people ignore is that a car sharing service could open up a lot of flexibility. For example, maybe our dedicated family car is just a sedan, but on this particular weekend with the grandparents in town, we can use the car sharing service to get a minivan and have everyone ride together. Or I want to pick up a piece of furniture and request a truck from the service. Or it's my anniversary, and I can request a luxury sedan to drive us to the restaurant for a touch of opulence. I'm sure there are many other examples people can think of. Like you say, car sharing won't cover everyone's need, especially at first, but eventually, the big players in the space will have enough sophistication to cover many cases, especially for a second car.
- vectorjohn 10y ago
  I think car sharing even works in those cases. It's all a logistical problem. Not that there won't be some people who own cars. There just aren't that many problems that are hard to solve with car shares to outweigh the huge benefits.
- bluGill 10y ago
  car sharing works less well for getting to work because everyone else is trying to get to work then. You may as well own your own car for getting to work because you pay for all the costs anyway. All car sharing buys you is fixed maintenance costs on your car. Car sharing starts to make sense when you want the car outside of rush hour. Want to go to the store for an hour at 2:30, no problem there are plenty of cars free. Want to get to work every day - you are paying peak rates for a car that will probably be used exactly twice that day, once to get you to work and once to get you home.
netfire 10y ago
Car sharing (if self-driven) does provide an additional perk--time and money saved trying to find a place to park and paying for that parking. In addition, people turning into parking lots/garages (or worse parallel parking) interrupt the flow of traffic, making congestion worse. There's also many other potential improvements that self-driving cars could use to reduce congestion (faster speeds, reaction times, communication between cars, etc) and greatly lessen the commute during peak times
Arelius 10y ago
"Rush hour" is actually a pretty long distribution of time compared to the average length of a person's commute. I imagine just considering commuting, you could likely get close to half the amount of cars required with car-sharing, since you may get in at 7:30 and I may get in at 9:00. And you could provide good price incentives to convince people to mix up their commute times a bit. I already know people who push their times significantly to avoid traffic just due to the stress aspect.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  This seems as good a place as any to add the familiar lament: Why does no one build new commuter rail in this country? (This assumes that you're also from the US, for rhetorical convenience.)
  - bad_hairpiece 10y ago
    I think it comes down to cost. Its only effective in very dense areas. For example, right now I'm on an established commuter rail line going from downtown to a suburb. I'm paying $12 round trip to travel 60 miles total. It's just barely cheaper than driving (not including parking expenses). At this point in time, I think it's wise to avoid laying costly new tracks with the dawn of driverless cars on the horizon.
    - clock_tower 10y ago
      I think there are physical reasons why driverless cars will never be as good as trains: they're rubber-on-asphalt instead of steel-on-steel, and you need a lot more engines, space, and transportation of dead weight per unit of people moved -- and they'll probably still need parking, too. As near as I can tell, driverless cars are horseless-carriage thinking... but trains have no element of novelty to them.
      - vectorjohn 10y ago
        Driverless cars can take you between train stations and destinations. No magical form of train will come to your house or go to your office. In fact, this is a perfect use case for driverless cars. The problem with trains everywhere is the wasted time not on the train and the million stops along the way.
vectorjohn 10y ago
Wow, so for the short time you have kids in diapers this won't work for you personally. Big whoop. We still have typewriters around too, and some people ride horses. Old tech doesn't die, it just diminishes to a smaller niche.
- marchenko 10y ago
  "Diapers" is just a synecdoche for parenting equipment: diapers, wipes, books, snacks for older kids, extra changes of clothing, etc. Car seats will be a bigger problem: they are unwieldy, legally mandated, and require careful installation to be effective. Unlike diapers, even the small boosters used for older children can't fit in a shoulder bag. A young couple expecting to have children in the next few years might balk at these inconveniences, and that could depress adoption of the 'mobility' model. You have to keep prospective purchasers in mind, who are evaluating their needs over the use-life of a car.

criley2 10y ago

I find it shocking that something as simple as personal belongings would be a "lock in" to existing technology. It's like saying "I prefer my horse, I can feed it grass off the side of the road, but you have to find some fancy petro-chemical station for your auto-mobile? Insane! My gas grows next to the road!" I get it, but try to put yourself in the place of someone younger who doesn't make decisions like "I would never replace my car because I keep spare diapers there!" >If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market. This is very Bill Gates "no one would ever need more than ..." argument. Come on!! ZipCar has literally nothing on the future of mobility. You (and many people your age, conditioned from birth to place massive value on personal car ownership) may never move past that paradigm. You might go to your grave in 50 years a proud owner of a vehicle in an era where almost no one owns. I think, instead of sagely predicting failure, maybe try creativity, use that entrepreneurial mindset to solve future challenges. You want to keep spare diapers nearby? Why not have a secure storage module in the vehicle, lets say the trunk can be split into 2 or 4 secure storage modules. You order an autonomous electric vehicle to your location, ETA 5 minutes. You hit the "bring my secure storage container to my location" option, restricting the available pool of cars to meet your need to those close to your container, at a small additional fee. Boom, the "insolvable" problem of personal storage in a vehicle is solved by commoditizing the storage and use the AI vehicle to transport it where you need. I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried.

username223 10y ago
It's not "personal belongings," it's "personal space." Hot-sheeting happens where sleeping space is extremely limited, like oil drilling camps, but it hasn't taken off among the general population, despite the fact that you only use your bed for around 1/3 of the day. People are willing to pay for their own beds and, frequently, their own apartments or houses, despite the fact that most of that space goes unused most of the time for someone with normal work and sleep schedules. Do you AirBnB your bed (at hourly rates)? Do you AirPantsAndT your clothes? Most people don't. I doubt I'll last another 50 years, but I'll probably live long enough to see the end of the current robot taxi fad.

netfire 10y ago

I think you are generally right about a primary/family car, but less so for a second, commuter car. I think this mainly hinges around making the self-driving technology safe, reliable and cheap (that is, cheaper than owning a car currently). I think taxis would be used more if they were significantly cheaper. Buses and trains have extra delays for stops, and you may still have to walk/bike after you get off. Having a cheap transportation option once you get off the train would probably increase train ridership as well, and decrease congestion during peak hours (at least for the major freeways, it may increase it some on roads closer to the train station)

willyt 10y ago
Trains should be faster than cars in dense urban environments (if you are close to the station), e.g. London Euston to Watford 19miles 15-20mins by train 32mins by car (outside rush hour).
- cjrp 10y ago
  Although you do have to enter the station ~5 mins before the train leaves (allowing time to get through the ticket barrier, walk to the platform, board the train), plus exiting at the other end. My train gets into London Bridge in the morning at :32 but I don't get to the street until :36 because of the sheer volume of people. It seems minor, but it does all add up. That said, in rush hour there's no contest - that same journey would take 1 hour+.

tbabb 10y ago

> The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market. - A personal, individual vehicle which comes to pick you up where you are and take you to exactly where you want to go is a much MUCH higher value proposition than public transit. - Add self-driving to the mix, and the cost of that service will plummet. - When the car providing that service can drive itself, then there is little to no inconvenience to the vehicle owner to offer that service, and significant financial incentive. - Because car owners will be able to make "rent" from their capital investment, owning a car will start to look more like property ownership than a depreciating investment-- especially as maintenance and operation costs fall for electric vehicles. - There will be very strong financial incentive to use self-driving ride pools instead of putting up a large wad of cash to own a car. So total car ownership will go way down, and will be done much more by the wealthy and much less by the working/middle class. - Cost of ownership is especially high in cities (parking), and the market for ride sharing is highest. So probably many fewer city dwellers will own cars. - Families that own can shrink to one car instead of two, since the car can drop people off or pick them up. I think there are a lot of pretty good reasons why the vehicle market is going to change significantly in the next 15 years.

emodendroket 10y ago
> Cost of ownership is especially high in cities (parking), and the market for ride sharing is highest. So probably many fewer city dwellers will own cars. If it's really self-driving it can go park wherever. Not very good for the environment, perhaps, but it completely solves that problem.
- bad_hairpiece 10y ago
  The farther the car goes to park, the longer the wait for it to pick you up on demand. Not to mention, traveling a few blocks rarely saves much on parking in densely populated areas.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    It can travel way further than "a few blocks" and I'd guess most trips are not so unexpected that it's impossible to accept a delay of 30 minutes or maybe even longer.

kpil 10y ago

Exactly. Maybe poor people will take the robocab from hell, with sick on the floor. Most people will not.

vectorjohn 10y ago
Uh, what? Cabs are already really popular. Why would a self driving car be "from hell"? You think they can't be cleaned?
vidarh 10y ago
Poor people might take "the robocab from hell", but just as I don't order "the humancab from hell" now, but order from the slightly more upscale "clean, air-conditioned high end sedan with blacked out windows and wifi" for just a slightly higher fee, people who earn more will still have alternatives, yet will still benefit from the cost reductions. The difference being that poor people will have the "robocab from hell" alternative rather than have nothing they can afford, and that more people will afford said high end sedan when it's self-driving, and will be able to justify it more often, and more people will afford to trade up to even more luxurious services. There is already a marked class difference in commuting in London: Low paid people take the bus four two hours+ for commutes that'd take less than half that if they could afford the train from the outer fare zones (bus-rides cost the same within the entire London fares area), so transport is already today segregated by income. A lot of the longer bus lines makes no apparent sense until you realise that low paid people often can't afford the train, or a car.

woodpanel 10y ago

This 'switch from ownership to mobility'-buzz is one of the most overvalued ideas recently. Much like the Kindle was supposed to kill the book. Why must some people see new inventions always as colossal destroyers of products they don't like instead of the more humble 'enriching ones freedom to choose'?

dilemma 10y ago
They're true believers and their faith is called religion.
dorgo 10y ago
Wait. But Kindle killed the book. I stopped buying paper books long time ago.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I've never bought a Kindle, and the only e-books I own are ones that came free with the purchase of a printed copy.
vidarh 10y ago
The kindle may not have killed the book, but it has made a massive dent in the paper-book market, despite substantial problems with e-books. It will likely continue to eat away at it. If self-driving cars has as massive an impact on car ownership as e-books have had on the paper book market, that will be a dramatically noticeable change in most cities.