Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to.
Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.
The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.
Here's the problem with centralized car ownership: Everyone wants access to a car at roughly the same time. Everybody in your "carshare" will want the car at 8AM & 5PM on weekdays, and all day on weekends.
Thus, the "carshare" company will need almost as many cars as it has subscribers- at which point you will be paying $300/month instead of $50/month, comparable to paying a loan on your own car.
Of course, pricing models can pressure some people to give up the car on weekends or drive to work at 7AM, so the "carshare" can indeed have somewhat fewer cars than it has subscribers. However, unless it can cause a dramatic shift in usage and field far fewer vehicles than it has subscribers, the cost of subscribing will be so close to owning a car many people will opt to continue owning their own.
I'm told ZipCar already suffers from this, and by nature is most popular among people who need a car extremely infrequently- a fairly small portion of the population.
I mostly agree with this. Any rational business model would probably require some demand and usage based pricing, and if you are using a shared car the same way you would if you owned it (i.e. commuting to work during peak hours, weekend trips), than it should come out to roughly the same cost as ownership. However, in high density urban areas, parking is still a real pain. In my opinion, this is really where the potential for driver less cars is. A dedicated parking spot can be expensive, and street parking can be a nightmare.
> Are bikes somehow magically different than cars?
It's not so much that bikes are magically different than cars, but that NYC has many more viable transportation alternatives than ordinary American cities. If you find yourself missing a bike for the return trip, public transport is a reliable backup in NYC. This is not the case in most other cities in the US.
> Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.
Well, I don't know, everyone?
Is it the case that everywhere people are yearning for more taxi service, or to own their own vehicles?
Why does "making cars better" result in lowered demand for cars? Is that how it worked for cellphones? Microwaves? Televisions? Anything?
Let's try your argument for cellphones: they're so good and cheap now that people can share them. We could put one in a booth on every corner, and people could just rent them when they needed one. We could call them "payphones".
Maybe we'll try it for washing machines: As washing machines got better and cheaper, people yearned to have fewer of them, shared, in a centralized facility. That's why no one owns a washing machine nowadays and we all just go to laundromats when necessary. Right?
> Is it the case that everywhere people are yearning for more taxi service, or to own their own vehicles?
Everywhere? You can't make generalizations like that, because there isn't a global trend. In developing countries, demand for car ownership is up, because of increasing affluence and the poor state of infrastructure in those countries. In developed countries, demand for car ownership is down, because of halting suburbanization, increasing awareness of expenses and externalities of car ownership, and availability of comparable alternatives. This is most apparent in Europe, but the long-term trend is downward in North America as well.
As for your analogies, they do not seem very apt. A major benefit to cell phone ownership is the ability to be contacted by or to contact people at any time, which a payphone does not provide. A major benefit to washing machine ownership is the ability to do laundry without schlepping your heavy clothes three blocks to the laundromat. The major benefit to car ownership—point to point transportation, on demand—would be provided by a competent robotaxi service. It won't kill car ownership, but for a significant number of people, robotaxis would provide everything they need out of a transportation, at a fraction of the cost.
Contrary to what you've been stating, there is precedent for replacing goods with services. Quite recent precedent, in fact. How many people do you know who subscribe to a service like Netflix? Of those people, do you think their consumption of DVDs (and, prior to that, VHS tapes) went up or down once they got Netflix? What about music: How many people are buying physical CDs these days, do you think, compared to in 2000? Sometimes a centralized service is superior, sometimes it isn't. The market will decide.
Between car ownership and robotaxis, I know which one I'd choose. There are a lot of people in this thread who agree with me. I think your "I don't know, everyone?" is entirely unjustified and I think you're vastly underestimating the frustration and expense involved in car ownership for a large number of people.
In North America, where I live, what I see everywhere around me is that people are literally putting themselves in financial jeopardy to buy the largest, shiniest, most luxurious car they can possibly make payments on.
So, I have to ask: do you have some stats for this long-term downward trend in car ownership you speak of in North America?
Sorry I can't link directly to the info for the United States, but if you look at the data the peak was in 2007. People who analyze this data are predicting the trend to continue. That doesn't mean it will, necessarily, but it seems to me the forces pushing car ownership down aren't going away any time soon.
Taxis are incredibly expensive compared to a car on a per mile basis. $1.00 is considered pretty cheap for a taxi while owning a Honda Civic averages out after all costs to around $0.35 per mile if you drive 15k per year. Now spread the registration, property tax, depreciation, and maintenance among 5 people and that cost is down to $0.17 per mile for 75k miles per year. I got these numbers from Kelley Blue Book if you're interested.
So in the end, you can run a 100% margin on top of the overhead of the car itself and still make fiscal sense for consumers.
I think you are confusing "demand for cars" with "demand for what a car provides", i.e. transportation from one location to another.
A driverless car isn't necessarily "making cars better" but rather making transportation easier. So the demand for transport may increase while demand for individual car ownership may decrease.
Personally I don't think I'm in favor of a driverless car, and I certainly can't imagine the impact it they will have.
Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to.
Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.
The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.