Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
There's a reason there's so much argument about future tech, because no one really knows what's going to happen. I see your points, but:
1) The costs are driven mostly by capital costs (purchase price) and maintenance. A large corporation has a giant purchasing power advantage over you and likely own their own maintenance service which is also a large financial advantage to owning your own. The mileage costs are going to be energy, which again the purchasing power of the service trumps an individual owner. This is all before the scale effect (more person-miles/day in a service car than individual ownership) which will likely be huge.
This leads to:
2) Money. Individual preferences matter a whole or less than money. We can talk about preferring your own car, and hating using someone else's car, etc. But if it saves you $400 a month, people will switch. Then service will improve
The rush hour conundrum is not agreed upon by anyone in the prediction industry. Some economists suggest that more ridership leads to more congested roads. Some argue that because upwards of 90 of downtown traffic is people looking for parking this could be ameliorated. Also, most traffic congestion is due to human issues:
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Still waiting to see a reason why corporations are going to throw massive amounts of money into buying fleets of vehicles so that you and I can save some money.
Also, maintenance is more a function of mileage than time. If vehicles are being used constantly, maintenance goes up substantially, and they don't last nearly as long. I recently had an interesting conversation with a cabby. His vehicle was being used 24/7 and as a result, was running up 300,000 kms per year. He was very happy if he got 2 years from a vehicle. Also, he was going through 2 sets of winters
each winter.
You don't just automatically save piles of money.