Cars are definitely more than a commuting device, they are cultural.
Also I think articles like this often forget that while it would be great to not need a car for the morning commute, people in suburbia still need to do many other things like shopping and fetching children etc.
Many of those tasks are just easier or more preferred to be done in personal transport. Sometimes you need to leave some shopping in the car while you go in to sit with the kids at an after school thing, before heading past a friends house to drop off their kids then finally heading home. A self driving fleet could probably still achieve that in multiple trips, but how many people want to deal with continuously pre-planning and concerting a half dozen small trips a day?
I strongly dislike suburbia and car culture does grind my gears in various ways, but I can't help but feel the car-in-an-app is solving the very specific problem of short once off trips, and solving that doesn't even come close to solving the nations transport issues.
I suspect that a lot of people who live in cities, don't own a car, don't use a car much, etc. don't really appreciate the degree to which people customize cars for their needs (roof racks for sporting equipment like canoes, car seats for kids, etc.) and use them for mobile storage. As an exurban person who does a lot of outdoors activities, it's hard for me to imagine not having a personal vehicle. The economics would really have to be compelling and it's hard to imagine they will be especially if the number of miles "driven" go up.
You will have carseat cars, cars with sports racks, larger minivans where you don't need the sports rack and so on. Uber today has a car seat option for example in NYC.
I could see cars that let you just move the stroller in and lock it in with standardized connection types in the wheels, no carseat ritual required, no waking up the baby. I can also see cargo delivery cars that you just drop your shit in and it delivers it securely to your house after you have gone shopping. Or even more likely, you just use an app for that and not even go to the store. Malls turn into showrooms.
All of that is for a self driving future.
What you do today is use something like car rentals when you want to go do outdoor activities. A friend of mine uses uber to go kiteboarding and rents a car with friends when he goes skiing.
There is probably a pretty well-defined density threshold where vehicle pooling makes sense, vs. personally owned vehicles.
In cities, pooled vehicles are a no-brainer. It's probably already faster to have an Uber come get you than it is to park a personally-owned car in the core parts of NYC, SF, or some other megacities. This is only going to get better, including specialty vehicles.
But as you get out into the suburbs and exurbs, it's more challenging to provide an acceptable level of service (max. 5 minutes from call to arrival, or some other pain threshold that causes people to just wish they had their own car). The economics also start to get harder: if I take an Uber (self-driving or otherwise) out to my house in the sticks, it's a lot less likely to get a return fare back into the city; that trip is a lot less profitable than circulation within an area. So it's doubly bad for a self-driving car company: you need a lot more cars/customer to provide the same service level, and you're spending a lot more time "deadheading" with empty vehicles, or charging extra to compensate.
That's not to say that self-driving vehicles won't significantly affect driving and commuting patterns, even in rural areas, but the displacement of personally-owned vehicles is going to be more challenging and may lag urban areas by a very long time.
>Cars are definitely more than a commuting device, they are cultural
I am from a generation (in my 40s) were most of my friends do not like the robot car idea because they love cars and driving. To me that is a very weird thing; I hated driving since I got my licence (well over 20 years ago). It is a nuisance and waste of time and I would never do it again if I did not have to. I find the cars I am supposed to like, like sportscars uncomfortable and beauty of a piece of transportation does not come into the equation. I do not know what it is with that obsession. But most my friends have it nonetheless. Which makes me have plenty of volunteer drivers who love to drive 1000km for fun while I read or work.
I'm the same way. The whole time I'm driving I'm wishing I could be doing something more productive with that time. It's a time suck and way too risky. Also, ubers too expensive.
I live in New York, frequently travel to suburbs around the country and world, and have not missed for a second the driver's license I gave up almost 5 years ago. This might be a generational thing.
I don't understand. Do places like the US national parks have train stations? And do you take an Uber all the way into the wilderness? Are Uber drivers really happy do that? Do you carry a SATCOM system so you can get a data connection to request an Uber to get home again? How long do you have to wait for one to turn up if you are doing a climb three hours drive into the wilderness?
For example look at the 'getting here' page for a random national park, like Zion. It only lists directions for private cars. Presumably if there was any other way of getting there then someone like the National Parks would make it extremely clear how to do that. Are there train stations near Zion? Would you literally take an Uber all the way there from a major city? It would be hundreds of dollars wouldn't it?
If you got an invite to join your friends hiking for a few days in Zion next week, how would you get there?
I think you're going to reply 'well obviously you can't quite do everything and I wouldn't be able to do a climb far from a central visitor centre or join those friends' and bingo, I think the bar for what you can do outdoors without a car to get you there is pretty sad and you'll be missing out rather than living some high life of car freedom.
My car's paid for, sits out of the way in my garage and costs me a week or so's wages a year in maintenance, fuel and insurance. It's an effective tool to get out there in the world and do things with basically zero negative impact on my life.
National parks do have buses. I live in NYC, and have backpacked from one bus stop to another (three days and 25 miles away) through state wilderness in the Catskills. How you get from place to place changes, and it does take a little bit more planning, but it's really not a big deal. I agree, if you're in the mountain west, it's really hard not to have a car and go hiking or camping or biking. But if you're in a well connected area of the country, with lots of buses, trains and boats connecting the relatively close together locales, it's really not that hard to get out without a car. And even in the mountain west, if you have a group of friends you always go out with, you really only need one or two cars amongst all of you (and it may be cheaper to rent when you need it).
Car rentals for those times you really need a car for a few days. Especially given the cost of parking in a city like DC or NYC (unless you want to play the "move your car every other day for street cleaning" game), it's possible to rent a car almost every weekend for the same cost.
You don't miss the freedom of not having to return to the spot where you left your personal vehicle because you never enjoyed it. If you are used to taking public transport you might be massively put off by the idea of being limited to round trips from wherever you left your car.
Theoretically, people could take the best of both worlds by substituting public for rental or personal for public when the other has an advantage, but that rarely happens because people tend to stick to the mode of transport they are most used to.
Personally, I am lucky to be just two days of cycling (or one really long day) from the Alps, and when I do that trip on external power it does not matter wether it is by train or by car, it always feels like cheating.
If my worst case is paying a few hundred dollars for a hired car to get to and from places as remote as Zion, places I don't go more than once or twice a year, I say good riddance to the cost and hassle of owning, maintaining and operating a car. All of this only gets easier when cars drive themselves.
What's what I'd said someone would say. 'replace much'. And I think 'much' would turn out to be a pretty poor standard compared to what you can do with a car. The logistical organisation involved in achieving what you could do would be a huge time and money sink - which is what people who give up cars often say was the benefit in the first place!
You wouldn't get to join your friends hiking in Zion is what would happen in reality.
No, you'd rent a car is what would happen in reality. Same way as the vast majority of people who visit Zion. I went to many remote areas in the western US before I moved from the east coast, and it was often in rental cars (and not once in the personal car I owned, which remained on the east coast.)
This just isn't the obstacle you're making it out to be.
I can totally understand doing this with a rental car, but upthread, the idea of not having a driver's license at all was being put forward in a positive light. So that means no renting a car. Without the ability to drive, you'd have to not just rent a car, but rent a driver as well; that's like an order of magnitude difference in price.
Rental cars are already a great alternative to private car ownership in a great many situations, basically any one where you don't need a car where you live most of the time, and just need one for travel/vacation/etc. purposes.
Speaking for myself as somewhat of an outdoors adventurer: my wife and I still need a car for that stuff, but we don't need two cars anymore, and we don't use the one car we still have very much during the week (which means it will last longer). This represents a smaller, but still tangible, difference in car buying needs.
Lots of types of bicyling require a car. Downhill mountain biking is very exciting and the mountains are absolutely beautiful. It's like skiing, but more dangerous because there's no snow.
I live in a city with Car2Go and this use case is covered by the ability to make stops on a trip. You just pay for the time that the car is reserved to you. I see no reason that a self driving vehicle couldn't offer a similar option.
A lot of people do not by cars in areas where there is affordable and useful public transportation or taxis. I would say most people are buying cars in areas where a cab would be significantly more expensive.
There is currently no viable alternative to cars in the vast majority of the US.
Taxis are usually disgusting too. I won't take a cab because I frequently feel like I need to shower after sitting in one. I rate Uber drivers almost exclusively by their cleanliness, which is usualy very good.
All you save is the driver and some fraction of the accidents, and you gain a lot of sensors that need maintenance. Free transportation would be something indeed, but uber will never be more than a cheap taxi, and "cheap" is just a function of income.
Additionally, taxi service doesn't have to be unreliable, that's more about american car ownership being so high there isn't much market for taxis.
I think the typical SDC taxi will be a two seater. Getting rid of the driver not only saves on wages, but also space, weight, fuel etc.
By "unreliable" I mostly meant the primitive "call your local monopoly, and they may or may not send you a car in 1-30 minutes, so just stand there and wait and worry" system as opposed to the quick and visible Uber/Lyft experience.
I agree that taxi could work like that, I've just gotten used to the thoroughly rotten SF taxi system.
That is certainly the silent promise in any gushing text about self driving cars, time will tell how good the robots drive after the few years of neglect most cars suffer.
