Self-Driving Cars: Still a Bad Idea
Another analysis that ignores reality. If you live in the suburbs you will continue to own a car.  There are only a few people in the cities who actually will get rid of the car.<p>&gt;What would be the point of ownership when you can call up a ride and save money on gasoline and parking?<p>You won&#x27;t save money on gasoline and parking. It might be baked into the price of your ride, but the car must go SOMEWHERE after it drops you off, and that consumes more gasoline than just parking it. In most suburbs parking is &quot;free&quot;, though if you live in a city it isn&#x27;t.<p>You can share cars by sending them back to the suburbs - but rush hour exists for a reason:  people all want to get to the same place at about the same time so you end up spending even more gasoline by making an empty trip back out to pick up the next person. And that is it until the afternoon when it is the reverse to get everyone home.<p>&gt;Since you do not own a car in the first place, all your insurance costs, maintenance, and car payments are now zero<p>Because they are rolled into the price of your ride. You still need to pay for just as much maintenance, the only difference is how it gets billed - now it is a &quot;large&quot; bill at irregular times, after it is a small bill with every ride.  Oh, and payments for the average person go up: the average car is much older than a new car, but ride share knows some of their customers won&#x27;t stand for a &quot;old&quot; car, so they will be replacing their cars more often at higher cost.<p>&gt;This also means an end to giant car lots and large dealership buildings paying taxes on the property. The used car market would also be kaput<p>Perhaps, though I disagree, if ride share actually happens the ride share companies will buy from the factory. They will be junking (recycling) cars a lot sooner too with no used market.<p>&gt;Decentralized car repair systems and shop would disappear. Same with body shops<p>Someone needs to repair all these cars. That cost doesn&#x27;t go away. They might do some consolidation, but there isn&#x27;t much less labor.  For body shops there is still weather damage, so they are not gone. There is also a lot more work for them to repair customer damage - I just live with broken cosmetic parts that a shared car will need to fix - so in the end there is at least as much work with shared cars.<p>&gt;$100-150 million in parking meter and parking ticket income<p>Nobody will pay those prices when you can just have the car drop you off at the door and find free parking a few miles away.  However something needs to be done with cars when people are not in them, so there will be parking someplace. The costs will have to be competitive with just burning gas driving around empty (pollution and congestion!), but with no humans actually going there they can be gravel lots and cars can be closer to each others.<p>&gt;These cars would all be electric, eliminating the approximately 111,000 gas stations that employ close to one million people.<p>Maybe. Gasoline has some nice energy density advantages, but this is realistically possible.  You can trade charging for gasoline in all my comments above if you want. Nothing about self driving cars and electric require each other though.<p>&gt;  These would be replaced by recharging centers run by the fleets of cars servicing the public. The efficiencies of such an operation would eliminate most of the jobs, reduce taxes, and be outside of most city limits to avoid more taxes.<p>Now there is a lot more traffic out to those places.  It won&#x27;t avoid taxes. Local governments are not stupid, once you have some infrastructure in place you can&#x27;t walk away easily so there will be taxes, though they will be less than inner cities.<p>Now compare to owning your own car: you have a place to leave your golf clubs while at work. You know the car will always be there for you instead of all the cars having already picked someone else up. Since the cost of a shared car are higher for anyone who drives even an average amount why wouldn&#x27;t you just buy your own car and enjoy that extra space?<p>If you are the type who would get rid of your car for a shared self driving car you already live in a place and lifestyle where better public transit would let you get rid of your car, using a taxi for the few exceptions.<p>Self driving cars have potential to be much safer than human drivers. There are ransomware type concerns to worry about, but overall humans are bad drivers.