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There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate. Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.

dsr_ 12y ago
If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".
- TheEzEzz 12y ago
  Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.
  - aetherson 12y ago
    For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude. It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.
    - TheEzEzz 12y ago
      Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour. You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.
    - prawn 12y ago
      Surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to adjust/stagger their working hours. I already arrive early and leave late to avoid peak hour. Pod-based transport would also make public transport easier and closer to a door-to-door experience.
      - aetherson 12y ago
        Or maybe surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to buy their own cars. If the advantage of a car-sharing scheme is cost savings, and then you start charging more, what's the advantage again? In any case, I don't think that that's a feasible option for the majority of jobs.
        prawn 12y ago
        Charging more than the cheaper default. Doubt it will be as much as the depreciation, registration, insurance and servicing of a car. Right now, my wife and I have two cars. One of them is only used 2-3 days of the week. The other is only used for a small portion of each day. If taxis weren't needing to cover wage costs, I'd already be better off switching from the second car to using a taxi to get to and from work. Registration, insurance and servicing for the second car is $2-3k/year.
        12y ago
Wilya 12y ago
Well, that's if you assume that Cars-as-a-Service don't need to be stored anywhere and magical disappear when they are not in use. I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Part of the storage space requirements for cars in normal use is access space for human drivers and to allow random access entrance and exits. Cars as a service can eliminate much of the storage space requirement.
  - TheEzEzz 12y ago
    As well as 'redundant' storage, since each car effectively gets multiple parking spots at the moment (a dedicated garage, plus a guaranteed spot at work, etc). Once cars are automated you only need enough storage spots for the cars not on the road, which is much smaller.
    - ma2rten 12y ago
      Also, cars could park on big parking lots, which don't necessarily have to be near someone's home.
- paul_f 12y ago
  Just think of how little time your car is actually driving versus being parked.
- omarhegazy 12y ago
  Yes, the car is the same size. But the bottleneck -- the crucial part -- here is not the size of the car; rather the length of the maximum distance that the car can be parked away from you by. When you're driving the car, it's really small. Has to be in a parking lot somewhere a walking distance away from you. When it's driverless, the radius gets so much larger, increasing the amount of potential parking space, increasing the efficiency of the distribution of parked cars. It doesn't have to park near you -- it just has to park. That makes the space issue so much better.
chillingeffect 12y ago
Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses. Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario? First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times? Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from. Third, subtract the time I'm waiting in my driveway with the kids screaming and my wife in labor for a car to show up from god-knows-where. Or else the premium I'm paying to get ahead of the other guys in the queue. And while we're at it, all of those times that I wanted something from the store 5 minutes before it closes? Guess what, if I can't get a car in time, that's lost productivity. Have to buy lunch from the cafeteria b/c I couldn't get to the supermarket. Unless you're telling me that in order to accept this vision of the future, I have to be perfect and plan everything. Telling me in the future no one will be able to get to the store 5 minutes before it closes is just unrealistic, undesirable and unacceptable. Fourth, subtract again, the additional energy needed to take the car to its next destination. Fifth, consider all of the extra cost of adding, servicing, verifying, maintaining LIDAR and servoes to all of these millions of cars. With thousands of dollars of extra parts, they're going to require thousands in extra maintenance, inspection, training and insurance. Yeah, I know that's boring. It's not an interesting technical problem, but that's the reality of motor vehicles. If anyone thinks this won't make the price of vehicles go up significantly, they've never been in charge of anything critical. I'm not "against the future," it's just that all of these digit-heads are seeing a grandiose signal-processing problem and doing multiplicative math like yours to make it look attractive and not even operating at a practical level whatsoever.
- encoderer 12y ago
  You sound like you live in the suburbs. I suspect car-as-a-service wouldn't be popular there. Honestly, if you live close enough to the store that you can drive there in under 5 minutes, to me that's a sign that you don't need to drive there. Where I live (Berkeley), and in the Sf Bay Area in general, car as a service would be remarkably effective and popular.
  - intended 12y ago
maxerickson 12y ago
That $100 is only low for highly developed wealthy areas. Square feet of livable housing is cheaper than that in most of the country. Undeveloped land probably mostly sells for less than $0.10 a square foot (that's still high at $4000 an acre). But that's partly because large sales of relatively isolated land will dominate the acreage transferred.
aetherson 12y ago
I think it's pretty unlikely that we're going to see most of the market for family vehicles be turned into a short-term rental model. Some, perhaps! Cars-as-a-service will have some advantages over, say, ZipCar today (primarily convenience, some amount of cost as well). But owning a self-driving car sounds pretty sweet as well. Not only will you be able to get the status symbol car you want, you'll also be able to leave your stuff in it (without paying extra to rent it for times you aren't driving). And it's better than the cars of today! You don't need to worry about parking! You can drive when drunk or tired! You never need to worry about your cars-as-a-service being unable to send you a car during peak times! Cars are popular to own today. Self-driving cars would be more valuable to own than normal cars are today. You have to imagine immense benefits to cars-as-a-service for it to displace most of the market for self-owned cars.
fernly 12y ago
Yeah, but how many of those garages are packed full of stuff, with the car parked out in the driveway, anyway?
- neolefty 12y ago
  If you own your garage, I'll bet you'll fill it up pretty quickly. But people who pay extra rent for garage space will reduce their use. So there will be some extra space, if not 50 million.

dsr_ 12y ago

If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".

TheEzEzz 12y ago
Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.
- aetherson 12y ago
  For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude. It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.
  - TheEzEzz 12y ago
    Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour. You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.
  - prawn 12y ago
    Surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to adjust/stagger their working hours. I already arrive early and leave late to avoid peak hour. Pod-based transport would also make public transport easier and closer to a door-to-door experience.
    - aetherson 12y ago
      Or maybe surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to buy their own cars. If the advantage of a car-sharing scheme is cost savings, and then you start charging more, what's the advantage again? In any case, I don't think that that's a feasible option for the majority of jobs.
      - prawn 12y ago
        Charging more than the cheaper default. Doubt it will be as much as the depreciation, registration, insurance and servicing of a car. Right now, my wife and I have two cars. One of them is only used 2-3 days of the week. The other is only used for a small portion of each day. If taxis weren't needing to cover wage costs, I'd already be better off switching from the second car to using a taxi to get to and from work. Registration, insurance and servicing for the second car is $2-3k/year.
        12y ago

Wilya 12y ago

Well, that's if you assume that Cars-as-a-Service don't need to be stored anywhere and magical disappear when they are not in use. I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.

dragonwriter 12y ago
Part of the storage space requirements for cars in normal use is access space for human drivers and to allow random access entrance and exits. Cars as a service can eliminate much of the storage space requirement.
- TheEzEzz 12y ago
  As well as 'redundant' storage, since each car effectively gets multiple parking spots at the moment (a dedicated garage, plus a guaranteed spot at work, etc). Once cars are automated you only need enough storage spots for the cars not on the road, which is much smaller.
  - ma2rten 12y ago
    Also, cars could park on big parking lots, which don't necessarily have to be near someone's home.
paul_f 12y ago
Just think of how little time your car is actually driving versus being parked.
omarhegazy 12y ago
Yes, the car is the same size. But the bottleneck -- the crucial part -- here is not the size of the car; rather the length of the maximum distance that the car can be parked away from you by. When you're driving the car, it's really small. Has to be in a parking lot somewhere a walking distance away from you. When it's driverless, the radius gets so much larger, increasing the amount of potential parking space, increasing the efficiency of the distribution of parked cars. It doesn't have to park near you -- it just has to park. That makes the space issue so much better.

chillingeffect 12y ago

Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses. Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario? First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times? Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from. Third, subtract the time I'm waiting in my driveway with the kids screaming and my wife in labor for a car to show up from god-knows-where. Or else the premium I'm paying to get ahead of the other guys in the queue. And while we're at it, all of those times that I wanted something from the store 5 minutes before it closes? Guess what, if I can't get a car in time, that's lost productivity. Have to buy lunch from the cafeteria b/c I couldn't get to the supermarket. Unless you're telling me that in order to accept this vision of the future, I have to be perfect and plan everything. Telling me in the future no one will be able to get to the store 5 minutes before it closes is just unrealistic, undesirable and unacceptable. Fourth, subtract again, the additional energy needed to take the car to its next destination. Fifth, consider all of the extra cost of adding, servicing, verifying, maintaining LIDAR and servoes to all of these millions of cars. With thousands of dollars of extra parts, they're going to require thousands in extra maintenance, inspection, training and insurance. Yeah, I know that's boring. It's not an interesting technical problem, but that's the reality of motor vehicles. If anyone thinks this won't make the price of vehicles go up significantly, they've never been in charge of anything critical. I'm not "against the future," it's just that all of these digit-heads are seeing a grandiose signal-processing problem and doing multiplicative math like yours to make it look attractive and not even operating at a practical level whatsoever.

encoderer 12y ago
You sound like you live in the suburbs. I suspect car-as-a-service wouldn't be popular there. Honestly, if you live close enough to the store that you can drive there in under 5 minutes, to me that's a sign that you don't need to drive there. Where I live (Berkeley), and in the Sf Bay Area in general, car as a service would be remarkably effective and popular.
- intended 12y ago

maxerickson 12y ago

That $100 is only low for highly developed wealthy areas. Square feet of livable housing is cheaper than that in most of the country. Undeveloped land probably mostly sells for less than $0.10 a square foot (that's still high at $4000 an acre). But that's partly because large sales of relatively isolated land will dominate the acreage transferred.

aetherson 12y ago

I think it's pretty unlikely that we're going to see most of the market for family vehicles be turned into a short-term rental model. Some, perhaps! Cars-as-a-service will have some advantages over, say, ZipCar today (primarily convenience, some amount of cost as well). But owning a self-driving car sounds pretty sweet as well. Not only will you be able to get the status symbol car you want, you'll also be able to leave your stuff in it (without paying extra to rent it for times you aren't driving). And it's better than the cars of today! You don't need to worry about parking! You can drive when drunk or tired! You never need to worry about your cars-as-a-service being unable to send you a car during peak times! Cars are popular to own today. Self-driving cars would be more valuable to own than normal cars are today. You have to imagine immense benefits to cars-as-a-service for it to displace most of the market for self-owned cars.

fernly 12y ago

Yeah, but how many of those garages are packed full of stuff, with the car parked out in the driveway, anyway?

neolefty 12y ago
If you own your garage, I'll bet you'll fill it up pretty quickly. But people who pay extra rent for garage space will reduce their use. So there will be some extra space, if not 50 million.