> Many people think that self driving cars will lead to less cars on the road, but I believe they will lead to more cars and therefore worse traffic. Since you won't be actively driving the car, the time the commute takes will become less of a chore and you will put up with it taking longer.
No, you just won't own your own car, you'll car share via a service like Uber. It would be way cheaper since you would no longer carry the maintenance and insurance costs for a vehicle. That's why it would lead to fwer cars on the road.
When in the history of economics has changing nothing but making a resource _cheaper_ lead to consumption of that resource _decreasing_?
Don't kid yourself, if car driving gets cheaper people will do more of it. Or will you not be more likely to take a cab ride when it's $1 than when it's $20?
> When in the history of economics has changing nothing but making a resource _cheaper_ lead to consumption of that resource _decreasing_?
Autonomous car price will be higher, maintenance will be higher due to more costly electronics, insurance will be lower due to lower collision rate. Given these 3 unknown variables, how have you definitively concluded car price must be lower?
Finally, your economic argument is incomplete. When renting a resource is much cheaper than purchasing it outright, renting always wins.
Owning a car will be the domain of car enthusiasts, not the typical consumer.
I'm sorry for any confusion but I did not mean to artificially distinguish driving an owned car versus renting a ride. Same thing, a 10 mile trip on either will put the same amount of congestion on the road. People will want to ride in cars more if it's cheaper or easier so we'll have more cars on the road. The total number of cars required to service this traffic may be less, but that will only reduce the number of parked cars.
As for maintenance/cost of hardware, I've heard that the LIDAR kit is under $10,000. Given how expensive new cars are and how cheap the same car becomes 10 years later, and given that that's a starting point, I'm not too concerned about depreciation cost.
In the western world there are also already so many suckers willing to pay the initial depreciation by buying new cars and then immediately selling them 5 years later for much less so they can pointlessly upgrade again, so the used car market will be filled with affordable self driving cars a few years after they come out. Like, you can already buy a car for less than the combined value of all its parts, because people put a negative premium on old cars. Why would it be any different in the future?
And given that LIDAR doesn't have moving parts, I'm not too concerned about the cost of maintenance. When you buy a 15 year old car, it's rarely the ABS or ECU or radio you need to replace, it's always moving parts like parts of the valvetrain, transmission, suspension.
And that's if you even use LIDAR. Tesla's cars apparently just use good old cameras. And we know how cheap and reliable those are
Why will car driving get cheaper? I think the argument is that Uber will get cheaper, not that owning and driving your own car will get cheaper. Perhaps it will get slightly cheaper if self-driving is much safer and thus leads to lower insurance costs, but that's about the only effect I can think of.
You are ignoring a major cost of operating a privately owned car: the time you spend driving it.
In the greater NYC commuter area, people already willingly pay more to live near a train station so they can more easily commute without having to "waste" the time they'd spend driving. (I'm sure this is true elsewhere) People are obviously already putting a price on this. Why pretend the cost of driving yourself is zero? It's absolutely not, unless your time is worthless.
Thought experiment: What's the longest commute you'd be willing to bear, if you drive yourself? How about if the car is self driving? If the answer to the latter is larger, you just proved you'd save literal money with a self driving car, not just figurative -- because you could move further away to cheaper housing.
No, you just won't own your own car, you'll car share via a service like Uber. It would be way cheaper since you would no longer carry the maintenance and insurance costs for a vehicle. That's why it would lead to fwer cars on the road.