
Will Electric Cars Slow the Adoption of Driverless Cars? - rbanffy
https://hackernoon.com/will-electric-cars-slow-the-adoption-of-driverless-cars-73793f182e30
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Spooky23
The thing the will benefit driverless vehicles is the increasing poverty of
the middle class. As wages continue to stagnate, more and more people will be
unable to handle the capital costs of new cars.

Nobody will ever choose driverless Uber-like cars for a long time. Paying by
the drink (ie paying the $0.60-0.80 + margin that it costs to operate a car)
will never be a good deal for the consumer. People will rent because they need
to.

The current situation with Uber and Lyft is an exception. Uber has revealed
itself to be a criminal enterprise and both companies rely on VC subsidy and
pushing liability to operators to survive. That’s not a model that will stand
the test of time.

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jessriedel
> Paying by the drink (ie paying the $0.60-0.80 + margin that it costs to
> operate a car) will never be a good deal for the consumer.

The economics of this are the opposite. Having cars sit unused in driveways
and parking spots, and be maintained by non-experts, is highly inefficient.
Just like cloud infrastructure, it is more efficient to centralize and rent
out capacity as needed.

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Spooky23
No way. It’s inefficent for a business trying to make money. As an individual,
I don’t have to recognize depreciation nor do I get to deduct depreciation as
a non taxable business expense.

If it were more cost effective to rent cars, we’d be going to Hertz every
month. By the time you build in the overhead, profit, risk, etc, you always
pay more. A middle of the road car costs <$0.60/mile to operate, insure, fuel
and maintain. Uber is easily 10x that, even with Uber losing money on almost
every ride.

I’ve been in the business of centralizing technology services for twenty years
now. It’s a clear cost savings when you’re offering something that is a
commodity that can obtained on the open market. It’s clearly cheaper to rent
email. If you have the volume and capital, it’s clearly cheaper to own the
fiber between facilities.

Outsourcing business process is only cheaper as long as your use profile is
static — the change orders kill you. Transportation and people are similar to
that. Taking the bus to work is often a money-saver. But paying a $30 uber tax
or overpaying for Amazon groceries is just a drag. A family of 4 probably
saves enough in paper towels alone to make 1 car payment.

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TheCoelacanth
If you rent from Hertz every month, the car is still just sitting in your
driveway most of the time, so there is no efficiency increase.

If you Uber everywhere, you need to pay someone else to drive you around all
the time, that wipes out any possible cost savings.

Get rid of the cost of the person driving you and it will almost certainly be
cheaper to rent than buy unless you have a very high utilization rate for the
car.

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Spooky23
Youre still replacing me, who isn’t getting paid to drive myself, with a non-
free AI.

Add in surge pricing, surcharges for dead-ending routes, etc and you have a
cab. Useful, but inferior to controlling the car.

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nopinsight
The key factor in favor of driverless cars is the time saved from driving. For
many working professionals, their time is worth more than the monetary costs
of owning and operating a car, electric or gasoline. Even if one already owns
a normal electric car, it would be economically compelling to switch to a
driverless one and use the time saved to create more value for work and
career.

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adolph
You’d think if using commute time productively was a big draw, everybody would
be riding the bus already, right? I think that the folks who work in
occupations amenable to telecommuting and who could be actually productive
during a long enough commute probably already are. Self driving cars might add
value for the folks whose schedule doesn’t work for park’n ride but otherwise
fit the above params.

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beagle3
> You’d think if using commute time productively was a big draw, everybody
> would be riding the bus already, right?

No, because the buses themselves are not a reasonable working environment.
Every single person I know who can take the train to work does, many of them
able to work (on trains that allow working - that's not, e.g. subways anywhere
I've seen).

Not a single one of those will use a bus, even if it is overall faster (better
route, etc.).

Driverless cars are likely to provide a reasonable working environment.

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adolph
What makes you think they’d be any different from a regular car, taxi or bus
other than what you are wishing for?

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beagle3
I can work in a car or a taxi, as long as I am not the one driving.
Unfortunately, about 95% of the time I am in a car, I have to drive.

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DennisP
So electric cars cost more up front but less per mile, and you're maybe going
to keep them longer.

There's an opposing dynamic: a taxi drives a lot more miles per year than a
personal vehicle, so taxis (driverless or not) are likely to be the biggest
early adopters of electric cars.

Maybe if autonomy develops slowly relative to electric cars, we'll mostly end
up driving our own electrics, but if autonony develops relatively quickly,
we'll have a more sudden transition to autonomous ride-sharing and hardly
anyone will drive.

Here's an interesting article from this perspective:
[https://perspicacity.xyz/2017/05/24/this-is-how-big-oil-
will...](https://perspicacity.xyz/2017/05/24/this-is-how-big-oil-will-die/)

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pjc50
Absolutely. High-milage fleets turn over every three years. The Toyota Prius
became popular with taxi drivers very rapidly. As soon as the economic
advantage is real and large enough, the switchover will be quick.

There will then be a long tail of lower-milage users swapping over gradually,
and a small chunk of resisters and nostalgists driving manual petrol vehicles
because they like it or have the same "beater" for 20 years and don't want to
change.

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eeZah7Ux
no.

