I agree that if there’s a very big price difference, you’ll have a lot of disruption. But at this point, I don’t think that’s a certainty. We just don’t know.
We don’t know how many cars each AV taxi will be able to replace, what the AV taxi’s cost of maintenance and insurance will be, how much deadheading they’ll have to do - or even the relative cost of the vehicle. If each AV taxi replaces 10 cars, you’ll have a different relative cost than if each can replace 6 cars (or 14) - and that will likely vary from place to place, depending on usage patterns and population density and user tolerance for boarding delays.
In superdense areas with high parking costs and short trip lengths, AV taxis will compare more favorably with private ownership than in suburban areas with low parking costs and longer trip lengths. We just have no idea which will predominate.
I think there are two social trends that need to be considered. The first is the aging of the industrial world, including America. The attraction of robotaxis to the elderly is obvious.
The second is the ubiquity of ride-sharing and subscription transport on American college campuses. Everything from Zip cars to subscription use of bicycles and scooters. A generation of young folk are getting accustomed to a different perspective on the ownership of transportation.
To paraphrase Dylan, “The memes they are a’changing…”
The real cost of a smartphone is not the hardware, it is paying for connectivity. And most major software is now bought on a yearly subscription. I suspect that may be the business model for self-driving cars, a one time purchase of the hardware and a yearly subscription for the self-driving software and connectivity. I think if one is invested in Tesla one should hope this is the case as that is where one gets high margin revenue.
Once/if self-driving becomes the norm, the concept of the car radically changes. Performance will no longer matter. If you aren’t driving you probably won’t care about acceleration or maneuverability or even styling. What matters will be comfort, safety, and whether you can get uninterrupted cable TV while traveling. It will be a software driven industry where cars will be rectangular boxes with interiors designed to resemble a living room or office. That I think is the major long-term threat to existing car manufacturers. Can they shift from a hardware focused industry to one where the value is mostly in software?
Not really, the real cost is software and services. Connectivity is trivially cheap … except in the USA for some reason. We pay something like 5 or 10 times more for voice/data connectivity.
IMO, it wasn’t just price that stopped milk deliveries. People had to go to the store anyway to buy their other groceries. Milk deliveries only arrived (typically) one time per day…in the morning. You had to manage needing more (or less) bottles, vacations etc as an extra thing to worry about. Getting it at the store was much easier…you already had a cart full of other stuff.
For the milk producers it was inefficient driving around and bringing the milk to each porch rather than unloading a truckful at a supermarket.
I also remember a bread delivery truck
I would also add that younger people are experiencing more anxiety when considering driving and are opting to NOT purchase a car.
True story - DW is a career counselor at a suburban College. More and more students that she is seeing are looking for jobs where they can take public transportation - not because they can’t afford a car - but because the thought of taking a driving test, and actually driving in traffic sends them over the edge.
Yeah, yeah. Replace “cars” with “horses” and see how it sounds. Personal cars will become the playthings of the rich. Pretty much useless, but a fine and expensive amusement. Sure, people want such toys, but they can’t be justified.
In cities, the cost of parking alone will make them stupid expensive.
Meanwhile, on the other side, mobile businesses will make many current errands that require a car unnecessary, because the service will come to you.
Once the autonomous tech is available, relative cost will pretty much determine how quickly this happens.
That doesn’t really follow. Just because consumers are going to be less concerned with driving performance (because they’re not driving) doesn’t mean this will become a software driven product. In fact, perhaps the opposite, because we would hope/expect that all of the driving software will operate to the same level of safety - if all self-driving cars just “work,” the consumer ought to become as indifferent to the “brand” of software driving the car as they are to performance issues.
Instead, the consumer may focus more on the other things that are already key components of car-buying decisions: interior appointments, exterior styling, mechanical reliability, warranty provisions, fit and finish, and how well designed the car is for their intended use (ie. is there enough cargo space, two or three rows of seats, big enough to fit my family/small enough for a city driver, etc.).
Those are physical manufacturing things, not software things - consumers may (and probably will) still care as much about how well the car seats are manufacturer and how comfortable they are whether they drive or the car drives itself. People care a lot about what their living rooms are like; there’s a lot of thought that (sometimes) goes into how office spaces are designed and furnished.
Another working day has ended Only the rush hour hell to face Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes Contestants in a suicidal race
THAT is why people want some automatic/autonomous option. How great it would be to have something like virtual “tracks” enabled in a freeway or a highway that would take over the car in a designated zone and keep all the cars moving on a specific course at a speed…few rearends, reduced fighting to merge, swerving cutoffs, accidents… all the totally stressful and stupid things that happen thousands of times a day commuting. It’ll never happen of course, because individuality and who would take the risk on such a Big Brother driver. Oops, the Boston T shut down again, beep beep beep you’re on your own. Real autonomy is years away, and DACC is not autonomy.
This is the thing, Musk is going to drive down the average price of a Tesla but not the quality. The quality may yet improve in production times etc…He is not simply throwing numbers out to naval gaze.
I am a critic of Musk’s but also a fan. And not much of a critic and not much of a fan. But not neutral or unbiased.
He is someone who does not have to own the success. That makes his case interesting. If BYD owns it he wont care much. He will bring down the cost of Teslas. He will get the masses in to EV at a much lower price for an excellent product.
If he really feels he must compete with BYD, then you are not going to hear of the new model till late in the game. Musk will change his stripes in this regard. JMO One of the things he may aim to do is reuse factory space and assembly lines for a new model.
A lower percentage is signing up for the $15K deal but they can now rent by the month. The opening up to more beta testers does not increase the number of paying customers.
Very few people take the monthly option. Besides, monthly doesn’t get the beta anyway (last I heard) partly because you need to get an adequate safety score for a period of time before you get admitted to beta.
Didn’t Tesla recently eliminate the safety score requirement?
My guess is since Elon said that everyone that paid for FSD will get it this year, you don’t need a safety score anymore. He also said that this is a slow rollout so it might be into January before everyone is added to FSDb. From my testing, FSDb would have a safety score of 40 if it were graded. I think the score was more to prepare people to be very cautious. [reply #6 - https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/7190143/]
I agree people will want autonomy. I just don’t think that all of them will want to use shared autonomous cars, rather than cars they own themselves.
How many will depend a lot on the relative cost of each alternative. If shared autonomous cars (Mobility as a Service) is broadly and widely cheaper than car ownership, then MaaS will likely be hugely disruptive to the auto industry. If not, though, the impact might be limited mostly to the geographic circumstances where it is really cost effective (superdense urban cores).
I suspect that MaaS isn’t going to be as dramatically cheaper than private ownership as some have intimated. You’re really only saving costs of car storage (parking) and financing (cost of capital). Storage savings are obviously higher in urban areas where parking is expensive. But financing savings are also likely to be higher in those urban areas, because the number of cars you “replace” with MaaS depends on how many vehicles you need to serve a given number of customers - which has to adjust to deadheading and response time requirements. In other words, if you have lots of customers taking short trips densely packed together, you can replace a much larger number of privately-owned cars with a single MaaS vehicle than otherwise.
There also costs that will be a little higher with MaaS cars - obviously the deadhead miles will be an added cost, and you’ll likely have more wear-and-tear and interior cleaning needs than the private equivalents.
Which is why both Musk and Barra are aiming for it. The profits from running MaaS are far higher than selling cars. All the manufacturers know it. The only question is when, not if–it becomes reality.