The Money Mustache Community
General Discussion => Welcome and General Discussion => Topic started by: swampwiz on October 03, 2018, 05:34:54 PM
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I was reading/watching this, and it got me interested:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-03/gm-s-cruise-draws-2-75-billion-from-honda-in-self-driving-pact
I'd be very worried that my new car would become obsolete in a few years. I'm going to do the Moustachian thing and keep driving my 2003, 165K mileage VW.
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No. The value of our car is strictly in convenience, and I don’t see that evaporating in the next 10 years.
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I don't believe it is the kind of technology that will see a 100% turnover all of the sudden. It will be more like the EV's, which we currently can't produce fast enough to keep up with demand.
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We have some collector cars in the family and in the last few years I have been thinking that someday they might not be allowed to drive on the road or restricted to only certain lanes / areas.
Once self driving cars are the norm driver based cars would seem to be an issue so it would only make sense.
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New car? I think you might have this forum mixed up with Bogleheads!
My car is 24 years old and has 225,000 miles. It barely has front air bags, and has no ABS let alone any sort of traction control. It has a nonfunctional tape deck and splotchy paint. It might be worth $400 on the open market. However, it is in perfect mechanical condition and still gets 35 mpg on the highway. Its value to me, as Cranky says, comes from the convenience it affords me.
I bought the car just before DW and I got married 15 years ago. And since I do almost all my own maintenance and repair, I am likely to achieve my goal of having our kids learn to drive in it.
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I am likely to achieve my goal of having our kids learn to drive in it.
I think the whole meme of driving a car will be in large part obviated very quickly when driverless cars get going. I think that any child under the age of 12 today will not have to learn to drive.
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LOL. This doesn't concern me in the least. Maybe ask me in 50 years.
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Value? As in sell the car before the doors fall off? Why would we do that when the doors can be taped back on?
In all seriousness, I assumed the value of my car was $0 after driving it off the lot since that's what it'll be worth once I buy a new car in 20 years.
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No. I drive cars until they become worthless. There is no way for driverless cars to reduce my cars future resale value of ~$0.
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When I bought my new car in 2016 I did it with the thought that it would probably be almost worthless in 10 years. I can live with that.
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Nope, not at all. Back in the early 90s I was really excited about throwing away my keyboard because Dragon's voice dictation software was going to render them obsolete, but a quarter century later here I am typing this on a keyboard. Voice dictation has gotten to the point where it's pretty good for some uses, but it still has a while before its accuracy rivals a key board in many situations. Similarly, I figure we are at least another 20 years before self driving cars overtake human driven cars, but I do think that automated highway driving will become common in the next 5-10. It is the edge cases (think icy / dusty side roads) that are going to take a while.
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Well... new car?
*checks the URL*
Huh. I guess you mean, "new-to-you used car"?
I think that any child under the age of 12 today will not have to learn to drive.
I hear this a lot. I plan to teach my kids (currently 3.5 years and 3 months) to drive, fly, and operate everything I can get my hands on, which is an awful lot, because that gives them an advantage over people who can't drive shit, can't back shit, can't hook up a trailer, and can't operate off road. ;)
Value? As in sell the car before the doors fall off? Why would we do that when the doors can be taped back on?
Come on, show some class! Use zip ties!
Back in the early 90s I was really excited about throwing away my keyboard because voice Dragon's dictation software was going to render them obsolete, but a quarter century later here I am typing this on a keyboard.
You too? My dad had that, and I spent an awful lot of time training it to recognize my voice and patterns.
... and, as you, am typing this on a keyboard in 2018.
It is the edge cases (think icy / dusty side roads) that are going to take a while.
Yeah... let me know when a SDC can safely pass a tractor, deal with a cow wandering the road, and back a trailer over a bunch of weeds, and I'll start worrying about them maybe being relevant in the next decade.
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No, because a) my car was 6 years old when I bought it anyway and not that expensive, and b) driverless cars in my opinion have some major issues to work out before they become feasible, such as AI that can actually respond to a new route or a change in road layout sensibly.
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My next car will not be a new one. And I think self-driven cars might become the norm in 10 years or so. I also think private car ownership will disappear because of that.
For the moment we just keep driving our 8 year old car which is currently working well. And we will keep our 16 year old car as well as long as we both work. We just had to do a repair to keep it running.
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I kind of assume my new car has no value as soon as I buy it. Like a pair of jeans. It's value is that I can get places.
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The thing is, Americans love to drive. They absolutely adore it. It's a deeply ingrained part of the culture. I don't see that going away and it's a different thing entirely than wanting to sit in a vehicle that drives itself.
As someone who loathes driving and for whom self-driving vehicles can't come soon enough, no, I'm not at all afraid that my car's value will be ruined by driverless cars.
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And I suspect we are a good 30-40 years from any kind of major adoption outside of localized metro areas or specialized applications. The tech just isn't there yet for poor-weather conditions, let alone the years it's going to take to sort out legislation and insurance of self-driving cars. Even then, I don't see manual controls completely going away.
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Will these driverless cars be able to haul a (literal) ton of firewood out of muddy forests with no defined roads? If not, I think my truck and I will be friends for many years yet to come.
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No, my "new car" is 11 years old and represents less than 1% of my total wealth.
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Will these driverless cars be able to haul a (literal) ton of firewood out of muddy forests with no defined roads? If not, I think my truck and I will be friends for many years yet to come.
Great reply!!
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No. The value of our car is strictly in convenience, and I don’t see that evaporating in the next 10 years.
+1
A car has no value once I buy it, because I'm not going to resell it. I'll just drive it until it can no longer be driven.
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I'm 41 years old. I do not believe driverless cars will become ubiquitous in my lifetime.
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I suspect that when driverless cars hit the market, we'll be looking at a turnover of less than three or four years before manually driven cars become effectively worthless.
All that's required is for self-driving cars to be significantly less likely to be involved in an accident (which I strongly suspect will be the case due to stringent safety requirements imposed by regulators). Once that's the case, insuring a self-driving car will cost virtually nothing, and the costs will be loaded almost entirely onto manually driven cars. The severe price difference for insurance will have a strong knock-on effect on used car prices.
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All that's required is for self-driving cars to be significantly less likely to be involved in an accident (which I strongly suspect will be the case due to stringent safety requirements imposed by regulators). Once that's the case, insuring a self-driving car will cost virtually nothing
I love your optimism . . . but am not convinced insuring a self-driving car will cost virtually nothing. My experience with insurance companies leads be to believe that they will slowly ratchet up prices for manual cars, and will keep prices about the same for self-driving while quietly pocketing the windfall.
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The average age of cars in 2016 was 11.6 years.
I suspect driverless cars will be a little more expensive,
and it will take years for most people to warm up to the idea.
Given that, I expect at least 20 years before Driverless cars are
something you see a few times on your daily commute.
(ahh, commute not to work)
Have electric vehicles caught on yet?
Also, I don't have a new car, my daily driver is 21 years old.
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Don't even
wear have a belt car. Beltless Carless.
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My experience with insurance companies leads be to believe that they will slowly ratchet up prices for manual cars, and will keep prices about the same for self-driving while quietly pocketing the windfall.
I dislike insurance companies too, but the space is extremely competitive. Any company that does this would get undercut instantly. Car insurance companies aren't overcharging people as much as you might think -- monthly premiums are actually very market efficient. In fact, when a company finds areas they can re-assess risk to adjust pricing it gives them a competitive advantage (this is why over the years you see discounts given for various things). They make their money pricing risk accurately, not overcharging. If risk modeling changes, pricing will change too. Where insurance companies get nasty is when they try to fight claims.
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I take the other view, that insurance will be much higher for self-driving vehicles. With major decisions left to a machine, who will ultimately be held responsible? DUI's, manslaughter, property damage. If it falls back on the owner for not maintaining control (will there still be manual controls?) then owning such a vehicle may not hold as much appeal. There will be cases where these vehicles will take human lives, based on calculations made that instant. That life may be your own. Are you comfortable with that? Are you (and your insurance company) willing to accept the results?
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I take the other view, that insurance will be much higher for self-driving vehicles. With major decisions left to a machine, who will ultimately be held responsible? DUI's, manslaughter, property damage. If it falls back on the owner for not maintaining control (will there still be manual controls?) then owning such a vehicle may not hold as much appeal. There will be cases where these vehicles will take human lives, based on calculations made that instant. That life may be your own. Are you comfortable with that? Are you (and your insurance company) willing to accept the results?
I agree that determining fault will be more difficult. I don't think it necessarily logically follows that rates increase because of this. If risk of accidents is greatly diminished, we should see rates and costs also diminish.
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I suspect that when driverless cars hit the market, we'll be looking at a turnover of less than three or four years before manually driven cars become effectively worthless.
All that's required is for self-driving cars to be significantly less likely to be involved in an accident (which I strongly suspect will be the case due to stringent safety requirements imposed by regulators). Once that's the case, insuring a self-driving car will cost virtually nothing, and the costs will be loaded almost entirely onto manually driven cars. The severe price difference for insurance will have a strong knock-on effect on used car prices.
I'm a software developer who's done a fair bit of work with sensors, and let me tell you that dealing with the real world is really, really hard. If you're dealing solely in the digital domain, like a website or a piece of software, that's one thing. But measuring and analyzing real-life stuff is hard. There are orders of magnitude more things that must be taken into account, not the least of which is human behavior. There are some tasks for which human brains are just better suited at this time. Just think of all the things that could happen with LIDAR--dirty sensors, a leaf blowing across the road, a trash bag getting snagged, swirling snow, accumulated snow. Or just human behavior--is that pedestrian going to dart across traffic in front of you? Is the person across the intersection waving for you to go ahead of them? Getting accurate inputs into the system is hard to begin with, and making decisions based on that information is super tricky.
Now, certainly computers can reduce a lot of avoidable accidents. They can react quicker than humans can. They won't have a tendency to tailgate (any closer than is safe) or road rage. But there's a lot of very fuzzy logic our brains do that is going to be very difficult to improve upon.
This seems appropriate: https://xkcd.com/2030/
(just replace "voting" with "driving")
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The thing is, Americans love to drive. They absolutely adore it. It's a deeply ingrained part of the culture. I don't see that going away and it's a different thing entirely than wanting to sit in a vehicle that drives itself.
As someone who loathes driving and for whom self-driving vehicles can't come soon enough, no, I'm not at all afraid that my car's value will be ruined by driverless cars.
This used to be true but it no longer is. Now many young people dislike it because you can't be on your phone at the same time.
I have an8 and 11 year old. I think both will learn to drive, but won't drive for long.
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It's moreso that 50 years ago, the drivers licence was the golden ticket that got you away from your parents and with your friends. Now it is the smartphone. Kids aren't clamoring to get a learners permits like they used to because they already have an outlet to get to their friends/away from their parents.
The thing is, Americans love to drive. They absolutely adore it. It's a deeply ingrained part of the culture. I don't see that going away and it's a different thing entirely than wanting to sit in a vehicle that drives itself.
As someone who loathes driving and for whom self-driving vehicles can't come soon enough, no, I'm not at all afraid that my car's value will be ruined by driverless cars.
This used to be true but it no longer is. Now many young people dislike it because you can't be on your phone at the same time.
I have an8 and 11 year old. I think both will learn to drive, but won't drive for long.
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As an occasional bicycle rider, I hope the driverless cars are smart enough to turn on a turn signal.
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As an occasional bicycle rider, I hope the driverless cars are smart enough to turn on a turn signal.
As a driver, I agree that would be assume. Earlier this summer there was a spat of people changing in lane in the opposite direction of their signal. Um, yeah, I am going to pass you on the left if I see your right signal on, so DON'T COME AT ME.
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I don't pencil out any assumptions past about 5-10 years for cars right now. Our two cars are worth maybe four grand combined, so I'm not too torn up about it one way or the other.
Autonomous cars will arrive soon, and will take things over a lot faster than most people (including in this thread) seem to think. The used car market will crash pretty hard once autonomous cars reach ubiquity.
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I don't pencil out any assumptions past about 5-10 years for cars right now. Our two cars are worth maybe four grand combined, so I'm not too torn up about it one way or the other.
Autonomous cars will arrive soon, and will take things over a lot faster than most people (including in this thread) seem to think. The used car market will crash pretty hard once autonomous cars reach ubiquity.
Just like how betamax crushed VHS in sales with it's superior technology? :P The one thing I know about predicting the future is that it's really hard to predict the future.
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I don't pencil out any assumptions past about 5-10 years for cars right now. Our two cars are worth maybe four grand combined, so I'm not too torn up about it one way or the other.
Autonomous cars will arrive soon, and will take things over a lot faster than most people (including in this thread) seem to think. The used car market will crash pretty hard once autonomous cars reach ubiquity.
Just like how betamax crushed VHS in sales with it's superior technology? :P The one thing I know about predicting the future is that it's really hard to predict the future.
If autonomous cars quickly reach ubiquity in production, used cars will become luxury items.
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Not even remotely;
* Level 5 autonomous cars (i.e. cars that can actually drive autonomously in most situations) won't exist for decades
* They won't be accessible to the average buyer even longer.
* They won't be trusted by the average buyer even longer than that.
* Plenty of folks prefer to drive themselves anyway.
The only real threat to car ownership is increased public transportation and/or vehicle sharing, which won't happen either in the U.S.
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I suspect that when driverless cars hit the market, we'll be looking at a turnover of less than three or four years before manually driven cars become effectively worthless.
Hah, no.
Maybe in some leftist urban shithole like Seattle that decides they can claim they're being progressive while finding another way to tell anyone making less than $150k a year to fuck off. It's yet another way to have a policy that looks good, while screwing over the poor they claim to care so much about, so I expect them to do it unless forced by lawsuit to back off.
The rest of the country? No.
Let me know when they can figure out a tractor or spreader on the road and how to pass safely. Or deal with actual winter conditions. And all the other stuff that reality involves.
I'm a software developer who's done a fair bit of work with sensors, and let me tell you that dealing with the real world is really, really hard. If you're dealing solely in the digital domain, like a website or a piece of software, that's one thing. But measuring and analyzing real-life stuff is hard. There are orders of magnitude more things that must be taken into account, not the least of which is human behavior.
Exactly. Silicon Valley reliably screws up any estimates related to interfacing with reality, because the arrogance of "We're so good at dealing with things in a pure software environment!" leads to a belief that they're godlike with anything that has a computer, and that you can sprinkle some machine learning around to solve any problem. Physical reality has a way of being obstinate in a manner that a purely software environment isn't, and when the two collide head on, reality wins. Every single time. See Tesla.
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No, they can pry the ICE powered, manual gearbox, mechanical steering wheel out of my cold dead hands =D
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I suspect that when driverless cars hit the market, we'll be looking at a turnover of less than three or four years before manually driven cars become effectively worthless.
Hah, no.
Maybe in some leftist urban shithole like Seattle that decides they can claim they're being progressive while finding another way to tell anyone making less than $150k a year to fuck off. It's yet another way to have a policy that looks good, while screwing over the poor they claim to care so much about, so I expect them to do it unless forced by lawsuit to back off.
I agree with you that runbiketun's analysis doesn't seem particularly likely from my point of view. That said . . .this topic has nothing to do with political leanings. Describing a city as a 'leftist urban shithole' seems well over the limit for polite conversation, as is railing against 'progressives' who have thus far been absent from the thread. Your bias is showing. Vehement political attacks out of the blue just kinda make you look like a raving lunatic, not the person with a reasoned opinion that I"m sure you are.
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I agree with you that runbiketun's analysis doesn't seem particularly likely from my point of view. That said . . .this topic has nothing to do with political leanings. Describing a city as a 'leftist urban shithole' seems well over the limit for polite conversation, as is railing against 'progressives' who have thus far been absent from the thread. Your bias is showing. Vehement political attacks out of the blue just kinda make you look like a raving lunatic, not the person with a reasoned opinion that I"m sure you are.
*shrug*
My point is, I'm certain some city will mandate self driving cars before they work. Seattle is just the lunacy I'm familiar with. I expect they'll fight with Portland and San Francisco for the right to ban people without a lot of money from moving around first. They'll do it in the summer, it'll sort of work for a few months, and then be utterly shocked when winter happens like it does every year and nobody can get anywhere. Foresight isn't their strong suit if they can Make a Point by doing something silly.
The rest of the country will still be using non-self-driving cars for a long, long time. Out where I live, 20 year old trucks are still very, very common, and they're used for things I don't expect self driving to handle any time soon.
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I don't pencil out any assumptions past about 5-10 years for cars right now. Our two cars are worth maybe four grand combined, so I'm not too torn up about it one way or the other.
Autonomous cars will arrive soon, and will take things over a lot faster than most people (including in this thread) seem to think. The used car market will crash pretty hard once autonomous cars reach ubiquity.
Just like how betamax crushed VHS in sales with it's superior technology? :P The one thing I know about predicting the future is that it's really hard to predict the future.
Well, I did say I'm not making assumptions past the 5-10 year mark. :P
Regardless though, betamax vs VHS was two competing similar technologies, not an old one and a new one. A better comparison would be 35mm film to digital cameras. Sure 35mm film cameras still exist for hobbyists or specialized purposes, but digital cameras overtook them nearly 100% about 5 years after becoming affordable.
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I hope so, but its your new car for sale I presume (since I don't own a new car). I'll gladly buy a cheap car off you when its obsolete.
The question is backwards, I see this as an opportunity to save money in the future!
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Autonomous cars will arrive soon, and will take things over a lot faster than most people (including in this thread) seem to think. The used car market will crash pretty hard once autonomous cars reach ubiquity.
I don't understand the reasoning for why people would suddenly stop using non-autonomous cars once autonomous cars reach viability. Autonomy is a (very expensive) value-add, like cruise control or bluetooth. It doesn't invalidate the utility of existing vehicles.
Physical reality has a way of being obstinate in a manner that a purely software environment isn't, and when the two collide head on, reality wins. Every single time. See Tesla.
There's also the element of risk tolerance. For example, it's not a big deal if, say, Facebook's facial recognition systems malfunction. The consequences for its failure are usually negligible, ranging from "that's not a face" to "that's the wrong face." Big whoop. The probability of a failure is allowed to be higher, because the impact of a failure is lower.
Autonomous cars are far different, because the impact of failure is literally "people dying". As the technology gets better, the probability of failure will decrease, but the impact of failure will remain just as severe.
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Autonomous cars will arrive soon, and will take things over a lot faster than most people (including in this thread) seem to think. The used car market will crash pretty hard once autonomous cars reach ubiquity.
I don't understand the reasoning for why people would suddenly stop using non-autonomous cars once autonomous cars reach viability. Autonomy is a (very expensive) value-add, like cruise control or bluetooth. It doesn't invalidate the utility of existing vehicles.
When an autonomous Uber-equivalent is cheaper than driving my own car, why would I drive my own car? At the very least, why would 99% of multiperson households have more than one personal vehicle?
I view an autonomous Uber-equivalent as the true killer app, not privately owned autonomous vehicles.
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When an autonomous Uber-equivalent is cheaper than driving my own car, why would I drive my own car? At the very least, why would 99% of multiperson households have more than one personal vehicle?
Because you have child seats you don't want to haul into the grocery store with you?
Because you have other stuff you wish to carry with you to multiple appointments?
Because you live 20-30 minutes away from where cars are likely to show up and don't believe they'll actually show up when you request one because it's inconvenient?
Because you don't think a self driving car will be able to make it down your driveway in the winter?
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EDIT: dangit, Syonyk beat me to it, and much more succinctly.
Autonomous cars will arrive soon, and will take things over a lot faster than most people (including in this thread) seem to think. The used car market will crash pretty hard once autonomous cars reach ubiquity.
I don't understand the reasoning for why people would suddenly stop using non-autonomous cars once autonomous cars reach viability. Autonomy is a (very expensive) value-add, like cruise control or bluetooth. It doesn't invalidate the utility of existing vehicles.
When an autonomous Uber-equivalent is cheaper than driving my own car, why would I drive my own car? At the very least, why would 99% of multiperson households have more than one personal vehicle?
I view an autonomous Uber-equivalent as the true killer app, not privately owned autonomous vehicles.
I guess that would depend heavily on where you live and what sort of life you live. We put about 15,000 miles/year on our minivan, most of which is very short, local trips. When I think of how often we're rushing around putting kids' shoes on, I can only imagine that adding the complexity of effectively calling a cab would be an absolute non-starter, especially given the inevitable wait time. Also, if it's an uber-like service, that means that you have to make sure the car is spotless every time you get out. If you've got kids, that's not particularly realistic. I suppose that radio presets or seat positions could be saved in the cloud. Buckling in a car seat every time you need to take the kid? Fuggedaboutit. Driving somewhere and need to leave something in the car (say, you're taking a picnic lunch)? That doesn't work with the car sharing model either. In order to overcome these challenges, you're not just talking about a car that can drive itself. You're talking about shared cars that are located near you, that have seats that can convert into children's car seats, that are sufficiently numerous to always be available at a moment's notice, regardless of demand.
I know that my car will always be in the garage, waiting for me to use it. I don't have to worry about forgetting something in it. I don't have to worry about someone messing with the seat, or whether I've left it clean enough for the next user. I don't have to worry about whether it'll be there. It's old, yet reliable, and it costs nearly nothing. I'm fine driving around my 24-year-old beater, but I'm not a typical consumer, and a newer (shared, autonomous) car still has lots of value that needs to be paid for by its fares. Over the 15 years and 140,000 miles I've had this car, its purchase price has come out to about 3.2 cents per mile.
There are certainly use cases for which car sharing can be useful. Going to and from work, for example, where everything I take with me into the car also comes out of the car with me, or errands where I won't be leaving anything in the car when I get out. Going out to eat or going to an event, sure.
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I do get the impression that most people who are assuming self driving Ubers will take over don't have (young) children...
They'll probably be useful, to some people, some of the time, but all people, all of the time, such that they replace personally owned vehicles? Unlikely, outside dense urban cores.
Also, we've had UPS trucks get stuck in our driveway in the winter (did you know they have chains? Personally, I think he could have made it with a running start, but... he decided to chain up). If we get a layer of hard ice, it becomes quite the challenge to get anything in and out.
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There is still massive hype with autonomous cars, so take every headline and divide by 10, maybe more.
Insurance: A frequent trope is to claim that insurance companies will stop insuring regular cars because they will be relatively less safe. Never mind that classic cars without airbags are still insurable, and that the current average crash liabilities will not suddenly spike because some of the cars are now less crash prone (your rates might actually go down!).
Ownership will become a thing of the past!: Everybody loves the smell of a well used taxi, right? A lot of people keep half their life in their cars, between car seats, golf clubs, spare clothes, and god knows what else. Not owning your own car is going to stay without some major cultural shifts. Sorry, not gonna happen. How about never being able to backpack from a cell-free trail head? How do evacuations work in emergencies like a hurricane? Want to sit in your driveway for a couple minutes mashing a touch screen to get the darn thing to go EVERY FRICKING TRIP? How about never being able to easily pick the parking spot you want ever again?
Manual driving will be outlawed!: Again, see Insurance. Nobody takes away keys until you are a repeat drunk driver or have crashed multiple times in your old age. Laws and habits don't change overnight, not even over decades.
Old cars: How many of your 15+ year old electronics still receive security updates? Imagine the legal snarl of a 15 year old AI car on the road. Can your car be banned for lack of software updates, or security holes that easily let hackers crash you? Can manufacturers disable your car if the tires are sensed to be too bald, or an oil change is overdue? Can a car be banned because its control software interacts badly with another brand's software resulting in frequent crashes? It gets messy, which is why so far most sane companies have shied away from promising personal ownership any time soon. Fleets of well maintained and frequently updated cars is the only way to control for these types of variables in the medium term.
My advice: Follow the money. If companies can eliminate labor costs they will try to do so. Personal commuting costs companies nothing. So look for autonomous long haul trucking, taxi services, and food delivery to be the first wave. Next look for it to come to high end luxury cars where almost all features percolate down from. Maybe in 20-30 years you will be able to get affordable Auto-Drive capability on your Honda Civic, but not in the next decade for sure.
Set expectations: The difficulty of getting autonomous cars to the 100% level is astronomically hard. While developments so far are damn impressive, they still rely on a capable driver to take over when the map deviates from the conditions encountered, such as in construction zones. Many US roads are in bad repair, so expect a lot of frustration for early adopters who will find themselves beeped at to take over far more often than expected.
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But will more people or less people die due to the use of self driving (or driver assist) cars?
I suspect that less self driving cars will cause accidents and many of the accidents will be blamed on or due to human error.
Enter the outcry to get rid of old unsafe driver required cars for the safety of the children and add the support from the auto industry because making new / more cars adds to their bottom line.
Honestly if the technology is there and reliable it is not hard to see the case when deaths are reduced, the auto companies are lobbying to make money and the politicians get to not only get paid off but look good because they are saving lives.
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I suspect that when driverless cars hit the market, we'll be looking at a turnover of less than three or four years before manually driven cars become effectively worthless.
Hah, no.
Maybe in some leftist urban shithole like Seattle that decides they can claim they're being progressive while finding another way to tell anyone making less than $150k a year to fuck off. It's yet another way to have a policy that looks good, while screwing over the poor they claim to care so much about, so I expect them to do it unless forced by lawsuit to back off.
The rest of the country? No.
LOL I know, right?
Let me know when they can figure out a tractor or spreader on the road and how to pass safely. Or deal with actual winter conditions. And all the other stuff that reality involves.
Just be sure to start checking back after 50 years or so for that update, not that they will have it quite figured out that soon.
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Because uber is only sort of convenient in many areas, once you get out of major metro areas, even now? And it’s notveady to maneuver if you’re handicapped or have knee deep? And what if you want to drive a long distance? Most of the mileage we put on our car is crossing state lines...
I seriously can’t imagine why autonomous cars would be cheaper, though. At least not in my lifetime. I think they’ll be a luxury add on.
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Many US roads are in bad repair, so expect a lot of frustration for early adopters who will find themselves beeped at to take over far more often than expected.
Another area of concern is that if the car requires the driver to "take over," it assumes the driver is able to competently do so. For the current gen stuff, it's mostly going to older, more experienced drivers (as relatively few 16 year olds are buying $100k cars) - they have decades of driving experience to fall back on, though it decays as you don't use it. For greater levels of automation, you'll have drivers who simply don't have any experience to fall back on asked to take over. We've seen this in aviation, and have had a few fatal crashes that are a basic failure to fly the airplane.
Because uber is only sort of convenient in many areas, once you get out of major metro areas, even now?
You have to remember, the tech industry widely believes that the only areas that are worth living, and therefore that matter, are major urban areas. The rest of the country is vaguely defined as "flyover country" or "a bunch of racist bigots." Or various other similar terms. They literally don't care about rural areas, and have no experience with them.
I look forward to Tesla's attempt at a pickup truck, because it stands a good chance of being a pickup designed by people who think the only people who drive pickups are people who "roll coal" on their way to work in a truck that they drive to look cool. I question how it will actually handle being used as a truck.
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My car is already worth little. 2008 Honda Accord with 200k miles.
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Gotta have a car to have its value ruined.
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Because uber is only sort of convenient in many areas, once you get out of major metro areas, even now? And it’s notveady to maneuver if you’re handicapped or have knee deep? And what if you want to drive a long distance? Most of the mileage we put on our car is crossing state lines...
I seriously can’t imagine why autonomous cars would be cheaper, though. At least not in my lifetime. I think they’ll be a luxury add on.
Autonomous car ownership certainly would not be cheaper.
However, a full-fledged Level 5 autonomous fleet would be cheaper for an Uber service than a fleet of drivers.
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Many US roads are in bad repair, so expect a lot of frustration for early adopters who will find themselves beeped at to take over far more often than expected.
Another area of concern is that if the car requires the driver to "take over," it assumes the driver is able to competently do so. For the current gen stuff, it's mostly going to older, more experienced drivers (as relatively few 16 year olds are buying $100k cars) - they have decades of driving experience to fall back on, though it decays as you don't use it. For greater levels of automation, you'll have drivers who simply don't have any experience to fall back on asked to take over. We've seen this in aviation, and have had a few fatal crashes that are a basic failure to fly the airplane.
I'd imagine the smart automakers would never go the Level 3 autonomous route or try to get between Level 3 and 4.
The smart automakers will have really awesome Level 2 systems (driver aid where the driver is still expected to be in control at any time, but can let the highway cruising duties be simplified and have sensors for warnings)...gather data as everyone drives around with these Level 2 systems for about 5-10 years taking constant uploads to their system and then launch full Level 5 systems that should almost never require a backup driver to ever get involved.
Inclement weather is the main weakpoint at this time. Also if too many automakers do go the Level 3 route or Level 4 "lite" - there certainly will be accidents that set it back.
BTW - Tesla's system is a Level 2 system that the end users try to treat like its a level 4 system.
While infinitely more complex than an elevator, you know a lot of the FUD that I am reading here is very similar to what people were saying when they first started making elevators autonomous...
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I appreciate that my estimate seems very optimistic: however, I've seen enough demonstrations of the accidental power of gigantic datasets to remain convinced that the four-year-old car in our driveway will not be replaced with a manually driven car when the time comes.
Did you know that a social network for athletes entirely accidentally built a functional test bed for speed claims on athletic equipment? Strava allows runners and cyclists to upload their GPS files, and also tag the equipment they used. Earlier this year, the New York Times downloaded the data, and were able to say that Nike's new Vaporfly shoes are 4% faster than the average running shoe. In a world where someone can accidentally build a rigorous testing system, I'm inclined to assume that the existing challenges are a case of when, not if.
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I've driven a 2017 Toyota Corolla in the winter. It has 'lane assist' which is an auto-driving feature designed to prevent a distracted driver from sliding over the lines by beeping and jerking the steering wheel in your hands back onto what it considers the correct course. 'Lane assist' flat out makes driving in the winter more dangerous. I assume that the sensors have trouble with certain snow patterns that form on the road from the wind and ruts that cars make . . . but it will jerk the steering wheel in your hand in quite a dangerous way seemingly at random. If you're driving in snowy conditions, it's very important that this safety feature is disabled - to safely control the vehicle.
This is an example of the current state of autonomous driving technology that was (somehow) OK'd for use on the roads . . . and it's not all as magical as it's sold. Sure, it works fine under ideal conditions, but there are a lot of corner cases yet to be perfected.
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Yup - I think most of my usual points have already been covered, but I'll brainstorm a little...
Is the electric charging infrastructure already everywhere (we are North America focused, so let's say there) - all across the continental U.S. and Canada? In rural areas?
Short of labor making service industry a place to cut costs, will autonomous driving be clearly less expensive for most people? If you have an 8 year old gas car that costs $0.20/mile, how much will it cost to replace that car with an autonomous one and pay for electric? (Will hailing an auto taxi also be cheaper per mile than an 8 year old paid off gas car?) I seem to recall that Tesla was willing to pay for electricity for their early Model S customers, but now you're on the hook for that sort of thing.
If you live 20 minutes from a grocery store, in a rural area, will a 40 minute round trip actually take you 60-80 minutes with waiting times? (Also, how good is voice commands? It's pretty good at understanding "hold on, don't go anywhere, I still have more groceries to unload?")
How far along are they on setting up autonomous cars for loading up large items at the store, 8 foot pieces of lumber, hooking up your trailer and loading it with firewood? Has a lot of research been done on this?
How "smart" are these cars, if you have to move it out of your driveway because someone is at your house to do some maintenance? Can you just say "go park somewhere that you're not in the way?"
When you go to the beach, do you keep your cooler, beach chairs, umbrella and any other "beach" specific things in the taxi while you sleep in the rented beach house, or do you need to keep moving that stuff into the house while you wait for the next taxi? (Sure some people don't have cars and they do without these things now, but for the large majority of people that currently own cars, how do they do things, and how would going without a car affect them?) When you go to a campsite, are you dropped off and can't keep anything in your car? When it starts pouring at 4AM, and you decided camping was a mistake, how far away is the closest robo-taxi?
I think pretty much every example is to say, while you might easily picture a world where you rely almost entirely on robo-taxis to move you around, you're probably forgetting a few billion hundred million (I'll stick to North America!) other people that live their lives differently than you. And those differences might be solved to the point that "not owning a car" is more common than owning a car at some point in the... distant future. But I think it requires some big blinders to think we're close to that point, and that we'll convert rapidly.
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Yup - I think most of my usual points have already been covered, but I'll brainstorm a little...
Is the electric charging infrastructure already everywhere (we are North America focused, so let's say there) - all across the continental U.S. and Canada? In rural areas?
Do you have electric service at your home? If yes, then you have the charging infrastructure.
Pretty sure that 99% of single family homes (if not closer to 99.9%) in the USA have the necessary electric charging infrastructure.
Assuming that it is uncommon to have apartment complexes and condos in rural areas, I think rural is covered.
Apartments in California, for the most part, have electric vehicle charging "spots" available. More of this will be needed across the US.
You have to realize the old paradigm of a gas station on every corner is not how electric vehicles work. By the time "electric vehicles take over the world" it won't be an issue, because necessary charging infrastructure will be put in to meet demand because this is a case of no infrastructure really needed to start ownership of electric vehicles and beyond a certain breaking point, gas stations close down their gas services due to lack of profitability and only sell snacks while installing charging points.
Short of labor making service industry a place to cut costs, will autonomous driving be clearly less expensive for most people? If you have an 8 year old gas car that costs $0.20/mile, how much will it cost to replace that car with an autonomous one and pay for electric? (Will hailing an auto taxi also be cheaper per mile than an 8 year old paid off gas car?) I seem to recall that Tesla was willing to pay for electricity for their early Model S customers, but now you're on the hook for that sort of thing.
While most autonomous are electric, you don't need to have electric to have autonomous...I would suggest one not replace their 8 year old gas car with a brand new car of any type unless they were planning to do so anyway.
On the other hand, if you were in the market for a 4-5 year old car 10 years from now (to get rid of your 18 year old car that is difficult to maintain due to lack of availability of components), an electric would be cheaper overall than any gas vehicle due to total cost of ownership (no oil changes, no oil filter, no air filter, no spark plugs, no O2 sensor, no catalytic converter, no muffler, no PCV valve, no fuel filter, no gas pump, no charcoal canister or other evap emissions trap, no vacuum hoses, no ignition coils, no gasoline (far more expensive than electricity per mile), no timing belt, no water pump under high temperature demands, no inefficient mechanical a/c compressor, no large radiator with frail fins at the front of the vehicle, no coolant under extreme heat and potentially oil/combustion byproduct contamination, no head gaskets, no oil pan gasket, no clutch, no A/T fluid, 1000 fewer moving parts to fail).
If you live 20 minutes from a grocery store, in a rural area, will a 40 minute round trip actually take you 60-80 minutes with waiting times? (Also, how good is voice commands? It's pretty good at understanding "hold on, don't go anywhere, I still have more groceries to unload?")
Yeah, voice commands in most modern vehicles I've tried are atrocious. In the meantime, your electric vehicle with driver's aids will take just as long as your current vehicle. EXCEPT - you won't get stranded on an especially cold day when your gasmobile won't start or an especially hot day when your gasmobile overheats and warps the cylinder head because you didn't realize the coolant hose was cracking due to age and your coolant was leaking out little by little waiting for an especially hot day to have a total failure.
How far along are they on setting up autonomous cars for loading up large items at the store, 8 foot pieces of lumber, hooking up your trailer and loading it with firewood? Has a lot of research been done on this?
I don't understand, the human with hands and arms loads stuff like they do now. No research needed as a potential autonomous vehicle is not currently visualized to do all your individual chores for you - either it will be a large company doing deliveries per house or an individual driving to a store like normal (except not having to interface with steering nor pedals). If you have an autonomous Honda Odyssey - you'll load wood the same as a non AI version. If you have a Toyota Corolla - there is no helping you either way.
How "smart" are these cars, if you have to move it out of your driveway because someone is at your house to do some maintenance? Can you just say "go park somewhere that you're not in the way?"
When you go to the beach, do you keep your cooler, beach chairs, umbrella and any other "beach" specific things in the taxi while you sleep in the rented beach house, or do you need to keep moving that stuff into the house while you wait for the next taxi? (Sure some people don't have cars and they do without these things now, but for the large majority of people that currently own cars, how do they do things, and how would going without a car affect them?) When you go to a campsite, are you dropped off and can't keep anything in your car? When it starts pouring at 4AM, and you decided camping was a mistake, how far away is the closest robo-taxi?
I think pretty much every example is to say, while you might easily picture a world where you rely almost entirely on robo-taxis to move you around, you're probably forgetting a few billion hundred million (I'll stick to North America!) other people that live their lives differently than you. And those differences might be solved to the point that "not owning a car" is more common than owning a car at some point in the... distant future. But I think it requires some big blinders to think we're close to that point, and that we'll convert rapidly.
Yes there are all manner of one off corner cases that won't be solved for many years to come.
However, more people live in the cities than in rural areas and likely solutions (autonomous fleets) will not be designed to serve a few ten thousand scattered across a couple counties, but rather just the 1,000,000+ populations that are centralized in the urban areas (of which there are over 50 in the US alone comprising over 180,000,000 people).
Instead of thinking about how it won't cover 100% of the entire country in a near term think of the possibilities of going to a city and never having to deal with traffic or renting a car when you can just get into a transit network of mass transit + autonomous fleets. That would be a low stress vacation to me.
This really is the problem with mass transit in the USA. Many in the USA think mass transit has to serve every nook and cranny of the entire country or it is an utter failure. In fact, mass transit should serve the highest demand routes and make it easy for many others to get to a stop along that highest demand route. We shouldn't have a train every 2-3 hours but rather a high demand route that has trains every 15-20 minutes. The thinking that somebody who lives in the middle of nowhere can't get a ride so the system failed is not the right way to approach the problem in my opinion.
EDITED to ADD: I see where you are basically saying that some are predicting it is closer than it really is...and agree that is the case for 100% coverage (which will probably never happen) but 50% coverage is probably much, much closer than you realize.
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@Slow2FIRE
I agree your arguments are fine for serving the concentrated populations for most of their use cases. I don't see how that proves this assertion:
I suspect that when driverless cars hit the market, we'll be looking at a turnover of less than three or four years before manually driven cars become effectively worthless.
If 99% of the U.S. Population lives in metropolitan areas and just a few tens of thousands live in a "few rural counties" (I know this cannot possibly be what you're trying to say) and no one "has edge cases" then perhaps the above can come to pass.
I'm asserting that these "edge" cases are basically the everyday lives of a very large percentage of Americans, and that reality is going to turn "3-4 years" into several decades, at least.
Now, I can see the move from gas to electric moving faster than a lot of people expect, for the reason you stated - the infrastructure is... mostly kind of there. I don't know what kind amperage is needed - hopeful the large number of places with 100A service can handle this new demand. More and more people will replace gas cars with electric as the issues are solved, including range anxiety and, to cater to the U.S. market, the massive variety of taste people have in configurations. Still, the move from gasoline trucks (and perhaps, massive SUVs) could still take some time to gain momentum. Will I be surprised when the Toyota Camry/Corolla and Honda Accord/Civic drivers migrate to electric cars? Not at all! And many that choose cars for status (Prius, BMW, etc) will also find their tastes satisfied. But the market is much larger than that, and the available cars aren't there yet. I'm still waiting for that flood.
Autonomous and driverless cars, though, I think are much further off, at least at critical scale, then some predictions. That's why I don't see an autonomous Honda Odyssey in the very near future being ready for loading the large items and towing your firewood. I never said the car had to load the items for me!
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If you are making a long trip in an electric car, do you just stand around at the rest stop for an hour and wait for it to charge? How long does it actually take to charge?
I have literally never seen a car charger anywhere in my city, though I have seen them elsewhere.
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Now, I can see the move from gas to electric moving faster than a lot of people expect, for the reason you stated - the infrastructure is... mostly kind of there. I don't know what kind amperage is needed - hopeful the large number of places with 100A service can handle this new demand.
For many people, you can actually charge just fine on 120V/8A and cover most of your needs. That's about 3 miles per hour of charging, which means an overnight 12 hour charge is 36 miles - pretty close to the average daily distance driven. If you have higher charge currents, it's better. And on 240V, you can charge an awful lot of miles overnight.
If you are making a long trip in an electric car, do you just stand around at the rest stop for an hour and wait for it to charge? How long does it actually take to charge?
Pretty much, yes. The Tesla system charges faster than others, but you sit around and wait for half an hour to a few hours, depending on the car and charge station.
Or you own a separate gas car for long trips.
Or you buy something like the Volt which covers short trips on battery, and has a full gas motor for longer travel.
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@Slow2FIRE
I agree your arguments are fine for serving the concentrated populations for most of their use cases. I don't see how that proves this assertion:
I suspect that when driverless cars hit the market, we'll be looking at a turnover of less than three or four years before manually driven cars become effectively worthless.
It appears that I got lost in addressing your comments without the complete context that you were addressing the 3 to 4 year turnover comment.
I agree, 3-4 years is not realistic with cars. It took 3-4 years for the smartphone to takeover from feature phones if you mark day one as the first day the original Iphone was for sale, and there are still users of feature phones.
When I discuss tens of thousands in a few counties, I mean across the US there are many areas (consisting of less than 100,000,000 people in total in the USA) that have only tens of thousands of people spread across a few counties. So you have wide swaths of geography of very low density. Not that I'm saying in total only 10's of thousands live in rural areas, but there are many rural areas of only 10's of thousands that likely won't be served in any meaningful way by autonomous fleet services (like Waymo).
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Now, I can see the move from gas to electric moving faster than a lot of people expect, for the reason you stated - the infrastructure is... mostly kind of there. I don't know what kind amperage is needed - hopeful the large number of places with 100A service can handle this new demand.
For many people, you can actually charge just fine on 120V/8A and cover most of your needs. That's about 3 miles per hour of charging, which means an overnight 12 hour charge is 36 miles - pretty close to the average daily distance driven. If you have higher charge currents, it's better. And on 240V, you can charge an awful lot of miles overnight.
Even better in some cases:
Our Prius Prime gets around 5.5 miles of range per hour that it is plugged into a 120V 15Amp circuit using only the cable that comes with the car without having paid extra for any other charging equipment. About 5.5hrs of charging for 30 miles of all electric range. So far, we've used 4 gallons of gasoline in the last 2200 miles of driving.
If the battery were larger, based on my personal experiences, 12hrs of charging could satisfy at least 60 miles of range using a standard 120V outlet in the garage not requiring me to call an electrician or to already have 240V service.
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OP - what about you?
I don’t care. My car is not an investment nor an asset; it is a depreciating chunk of steel, aluminum, plastics and whatever else it is cars are made of nowadays. It is a means of conveyance. I acknowledge this and intend to drive the vehicle until repair and upkeep is no longer feasible.
Why not ask if I’m concerned that my internal combustion powered people-moving device will lose value because it, well, has an internal combustion engine.
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I don't understand, the human with hands and arms loads stuff like they do now. No research needed as a potential autonomous vehicle is not currently visualized to do all your individual chores for you - either it will be a large company doing deliveries per house or an individual driving to a store like normal (except not having to interface with steering nor pedals). If you have an autonomous Honda Odyssey - you'll load wood the same as a non AI version. If you have a Toyota Corolla - there is no helping you either way.
Ahem. :) As an owner of both a Honda Odyssey and a Toyota Corolla, I can firmly state that you *can* fit 8-foot lumber in a Corolla. Not a 4x8 sheet of plywood, but 2x4's fit quite comfortably if you fold down the rear seats.
In fact, I can *almost* fit 10' lengths of copper pipe or electrical conduit fully inside the car. When I need to haul those, they have to protrude out the passenger's window a few inches.
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I don't understand, the human with hands and arms loads stuff like they do now. No research needed as a potential autonomous vehicle is not currently visualized to do all your individual chores for you - either it will be a large company doing deliveries per house or an individual driving to a store like normal (except not having to interface with steering nor pedals). If you have an autonomous Honda Odyssey - you'll load wood the same as a non AI version. If you have a Toyota Corolla - there is no helping you either way.
Ahem. :) As an owner of both a Honda Odyssey and a Toyota Corolla, I can firmly state that you *can* fit 8-foot lumber in a Corolla. Not a 4x8 sheet of plywood, but 2x4's fit quite comfortably if you fold down the rear seats.
In fact, I can *almost* fit 10' lengths of copper pipe or electrical conduit fully inside the car. When I need to haul those, they have to protrude out the passenger's window a few inches.
Yep. I have often loaded 14 2x4s in my Corolla.
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Regardless though, betamax vs VHS was two competing similar technologies, not an old one and a new one. A better comparison would be 35mm film to digital cameras. Sure 35mm film cameras still exist for hobbyists or specialized purposes, but digital cameras overtook them nearly 100% about 5 years after becoming affordable.
The digital camera is probably a good comparison, but it's worth pointing out that it took about 30 years from the introduction of the first commercial digital camera to when they became comparable to film in quality and price.
The Fairchild MV-101 was a 0.01 megapixel camera that sold for $4,000 in 1975 ($19,000 in today's dollars)
http://www.digicamhistory.com/1970s.html (http://www.digicamhistory.com/1970s.html)
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My car is already worth little. 2008 Honda Accord with 200k miles.
+1. I'm a bike commuter, and the 2004 Ford Focus with 130k miles that is my backup is probably worth ~3k or so. It gets driven about twice a month.
If autonomous cars drive down the cost of an eventual replacement, great. I don't expect it to happen any time soon.
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I take the other view, that insurance will be much higher for self-driving vehicles. With major decisions left to a machine, who will ultimately be held responsible? DUI's, manslaughter, property damage. If it falls back on the owner for not maintaining control (will there still be manual controls?) then owning such a vehicle may not hold as much appeal. There will be cases where these vehicles will take human lives, based on calculations made that instant. That life may be your own. Are you comfortable with that? Are you (and your insurance company) willing to accept the results?
It would seem to me that the manufacturer would have the liability, unless some entity decided to take on the liability; I don't think regular folks would allow themselves to self-indemnify.
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If autonomous cars quickly reach ubiquity in production, used cars will become luxury items.
Actually, the one thing that might keep older cars going is the fact that they will have such low value, especially for folks that don't have any assets, and can simply carry minimum liability insurance.
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When an autonomous Uber-equivalent is cheaper than driving my own car, why would I drive my own car? At the very least, why would 99% of multiperson households have more than one personal vehicle?
I view an autonomous Uber-equivalent as the true killer app, not privately owned autonomous vehicles.
This is exactly my point. There will no cost difference between owning one's car and hiring a car, since there will be no taxi driver in the loop. The insurance/fuel/depreciation cost will the same. And a taxi company will have the advantage by being able to depreciate the car's value at a much higher rate, thereby lowering the finance cost (i.e., a 2 year loan or opportunity cost rather than 15 years for an owner-operator), to say nothing of efficiencies in service, powering, etc.
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Because you have child seats you don't want to haul into the grocery store with you?
Because you have other stuff you wish to carry with you to multiple appointments?
Because you live 20-30 minutes away from where cars are likely to show up and don't believe they'll actually show up when you request one because it's inconvenient?
Because you don't think a self driving car will be able to make it down your driveway in the winter?
You'll be able to order up a car with child seats.
You might have some stuff, but you could put all that in backpack.
Being out in the sticks might be an issue - but if there is demand for folks out in the sticks to get into the local town, that could be enough for Uber to provide that service.
Winter driving could be an issue, but then so it is with regular cars.
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Also, if it's an uber-like service, that means that you have to make sure the car is spotless every time you get out.
I know that my car will always be in the garage, waiting for me to use it. I don't have to worry about forgetting something in it. I don't have to worry about someone messing with the seat, or whether I've left it clean enough for the next user. I don't have to worry about whether it'll be there. It's old, yet reliable, and it costs nearly nothing. I'm fine driving around my 24-year-old beater, but I'm not a typical consumer, and a newer (shared, autonomous) car still has lots of value that needs to be paid for by its fares. Over the 15 years and 140,000 miles I've had this car, its purchase price has come out to about 3.2 cents per mile.
At the UberPeople forum - who obviously are scared sheetless about driverless cars - they like to bring up the fact that driverless cars will become like dirty bathrooms. Of course, they don't understand that the seating area can be made quite watertight and easily washed like a pool toy.
The true cost of owning a car includes maintenance, repair & insurance. I know that my beater (a regular VW) has lately cost about $0.35/mile (counting fuel) with all the little things that have needed to get fixed, in addition to insurance.
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OP - what about you?
I think that the driverless car - and taxi - will bring about a much higher level of interest in mass transit, especially town to town, as the driverless taxi will get rid of the "last mile" problem, so I think that the cost of medium-distance travel will go down.
I will keep tabs on the REAL cost to operate my car, and the cost of hiring a driverless taxi, and obviously when the costs get close, I will simply park my old car in the backyard with a cover on it. I truly expect for the last time I use my car to be chasing the 2024 solar eclipse (i.e., being able to drive to wear it's a clear day) in Texas.
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I don't want every movement tracked by some Johnny cab.
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Yes, I'd be so worried that the value of my Kia Forte would drop from $10,000 to $0 that it would keep me up at night.
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I don't want every movement tracked by some Johnny cab.
In case you weren't aware, just about every police department in the USA uses license plate recognition cameras on their patrol vehicles and a high percentage have been found to be improperly cataloging people's movements (not flushing the data as expected).
https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked (https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked)
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No, there are still issues with buy-in for autonomous driving TESTING. It's a ways away. Also, what's a new car?
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does anyone even add their car value to their net worth? I just consider it lost money in the same way I don't add up the value of all my appliances to my net worth.
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does anyone even add their car value to their net worth? I just consider it lost money in the same way I don't add up the value of all my appliances to my net worth.
I don't, but then I'm usually just concerned with my stash which is invested for drawing down using the 4% rule, not my net worth that includes my home that I will be living in.
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does anyone even add their car value to their net worth? I just consider it lost money in the same way I don't add up the value of all my appliances to my net worth.
I do. I could get probably $4K fairly easily for it, so why not include it.
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I do. I could get probably $4K fairly easily for it, so why not include it.
Yeah but thats if you sell it now before it further depreciates and won't need to replace it. To me its not money I'm going to tap into, so why include it? Even if I do sell it, I'll need to then replace it. I consider it in the same way I'd consider any household appliance -- that is, a necessary expense without value.
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I do. I could get probably $4K fairly easily for it, so why not include it.
Yeah but thats if you sell it now before it further depreciates and won't need to replace it. To me its not money I'm going to tap into, so why include it? Even if I do sell it, I'll need to then replace it. I consider it in the same way I'd consider any household appliance -- that is, a necessary expense without value.
I was actually thinking about going car free. It mostly just sits now. Maybe get a scooter or motorcycle.
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Driverless cars are just the latest technology designed to make people completely helpless and dependent. I don't mind convenience, but when the price is losing the ability to do anything for yourself, it's just too much.
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does anyone even add their car value to their net worth? I just consider it lost money in the same way I don't add up the value of all my appliances to my net worth.
I consider my car to be a net negative to my worth . . . it costs me x$ per month, even if I don't use it at all. Necessary evil though.
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I've driven a 2017 Toyota Corolla in the winter. It has 'lane assist' which is an auto-driving feature designed to prevent a distracted driver from sliding over the lines by beeping and jerking the steering wheel in your hands back onto what it considers the correct course. 'Lane assist' flat out makes driving in the winter more dangerous. I assume that the sensors have trouble with certain snow patterns that form on the road from the wind and ruts that cars make . . . but it will jerk the steering wheel in your hand in quite a dangerous way seemingly at random. If you're driving in snowy conditions, it's very important that this safety feature is disabled - to safely control the vehicle.
This is an example of the current state of autonomous driving technology that was (somehow) OK'd for use on the roads . . . and it's not all as magical as it's sold. Sure, it works fine under ideal conditions, but there are a lot of corner cases yet to be perfected.
FYI - The sensor technologies currently used for lane keeping are inferior to Lidar technology that every OEM minus 1 is pursuing so I would not judge the capabilities of autonomous vehicles off of that.
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I consider my car to be a net negative to my worth . . . it costs me x$ per month, even if I don't use it at all. Necessary evil though.
Yeah exactly, it just goes in the expenses column.
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Driverless cars are just the latest technology designed to make people completely helpless and dependent.
Or maybe it's designed to save many thousands of lives every year.
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I've driven a 2017 Toyota Corolla in the winter. It has 'lane assist' which is an auto-driving feature designed to prevent a distracted driver from sliding over the lines by beeping and jerking the steering wheel in your hands back onto what it considers the correct course. 'Lane assist' flat out makes driving in the winter more dangerous. I assume that the sensors have trouble with certain snow patterns that form on the road from the wind and ruts that cars make . . . but it will jerk the steering wheel in your hand in quite a dangerous way seemingly at random. If you're driving in snowy conditions, it's very important that this safety feature is disabled - to safely control the vehicle.
This is an example of the current state of autonomous driving technology that was (somehow) OK'd for use on the roads . . . and it's not all as magical as it's sold. Sure, it works fine under ideal conditions, but there are a lot of corner cases yet to be perfected.
FYI - The sensor technologies currently used for lane keeping are inferior to Lidar technology that every OEM minus 1 is pursuing so I would not judge the capabilities of autonomous vehicles off of that.
Yeah, but lidar is a ranging mechanism isn't it? It won't help recognizing lane markings in the snow.
Is there an independent oversight body certifying any of this tech yet?
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Driverless cars are just the latest technology designed to make people completely helpless and dependent.
Or maybe it's designed to save many thousands of lives every year.
Alternatively it's designed to encourage people to buy new cars with new gadgets.
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Driverless cars are just the latest technology designed to make people completely helpless and dependent.
Or maybe it's designed to save many thousands of lives every year.
Alternatively it's designed to encourage people to buy new cars with new gadgets.
About 35,000 people a year die on American roads. Driverless cars offer the possibility of reducing that to near zero, and almost entirely remove the eleventh largest cause of death in the US.
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Possibility is a good term. Let me know when they actually work year round in places that have a real winter.
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Driverless cars are just the latest technology designed to make people completely helpless and dependent.
Or maybe it's designed to save many thousands of lives every year.
Alternatively it's designed to encourage people to buy new cars with new gadgets.
Okay, how about some numbers for you?
Estimated cost of collisions in the US over $800,000,000,000 on an annual basis.
(NHTSA 2014)
Blind Spot Monitor reduces lane change accidents by 14% and reduces lane change accidents with injury by 23%
Automatic Emergency Braking reduces front to rear accidents by 50% and reduces these accidents with injury by 56%
Lane Departure warning reduces single vehicle, sideswipe and head on crashes by 11% and the same with injuries are reduced by 27%
Rear view cameras reduce backing accidents by 17%
Rear cross traffic alert reduces backing accidents by 22%
(IIHS numbers from about 20+ different sources as listed on their website, assuming most of the data is 2015 or newer)
Looks like all these "expensive gadgets" could save the economy quite a lot more money then it costs to purchase the gadgets in the first place.
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$800 billion? 5% of GDP? I find that hard to believe.
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$800 billion? 5% of GDP? I find that hard to believe.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/29/steep-economic-toll-of-crashes/9715893/
Looks like part of the amount is estimated (societal harm). Still, thats a massive number. Certainly reducing the risks associated with driving would be very good.
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I can't wait for self driving technology to mature and I'm also excited about the transition to electric cars. The primary advantages I see are that the entire vehicle fleet would have a much higher utilization factor instead of sitting idle for 90% of the time. This will result in greater efficiencies, lower overall costs and less space devoted to vehicle storage. I think it will encourage many people to go car free or at least downsize to a single car per household. Sure, there's going to be niche cases such as camping where vehicle ownership (or at least short-term rental) makes sense. But hopefully, the vast majority of trips can be covered by autonomous self driving cars. We can reclaim parking lots and street parking in favor of green space and bike lanes.
The fleet will turn over much more quickly resulting on faster adoption of safety and technology features. Greater flexibility during travel and multi-modal transport. I can send for whatever vehicle is necessary, pickup truck, van, compact car etc depending on my needs for that particular trip. Hopefully it's the next big revolution that society experiences and we as bicycle wielding mustachians will be well positioned to take advantage of it. There will always be folks who opt for car ownership and maybe even stick with gas power but they will probably end up paying a significant premium in fuel, parking and insurance to do so.
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About 35,000 people a year die on American roads. Driverless cars offer the possibility of reducing that to near zero, and almost entirely remove the eleventh largest cause of death in the US.
For what it's worth, we could easily accomplish a similar result with old technology that prevents cars from being moved out of park until A) everyone is buckled in, and B) the driver blows in a breathalyzer.
80% of people wear seat belts, but a seat belt isn't worn in about half of all in car fatalities:
https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/defective-products/seat-belts/seat-belts-statistics.html (https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/defective-products/seat-belts/seat-belts-statistics.html)
Alcohol is involved in about a third of all auto fatalities:
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811155 (http://ttps://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811155)
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About 35,000 people a year die on American roads. Driverless cars offer the possibility of reducing that to near zero, and almost entirely remove the eleventh largest cause of death in the US.
For what it's worth, we could easily accomplish a similar result with old technology that prevents cars from being moved out of park until A) everyone is buckled in, and B) the driver blows in a breathalyzer.
80% of people wear seat belts, but a seat belt isn't worn in about half of all in car fatalities:
https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/defective-products/seat-belts/seat-belts-statistics.html (https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/defective-products/seat-belts/seat-belts-statistics.html)
Alcohol is involved in about a third of all auto fatalities:
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811155 (http://ttps://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811155)
Texting/personal computing is now causing more auto accidents than alcohol.
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Indeed. Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.
More gadgets for the masses.
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Is it a band-aid? Perhaps.
Are you going to be able to go out and change the behavior of the masses in any meaningful way? Probably not, there are already education programs, fines, and increased costs associated with failing to use the "appropriate" techniques and equipment that exists.
Is it possible that an error could be made while driving that has nothing to do with a person using electronic devices or poor judgement? Absolutely.
Would you feel safer if everyone on the road had more driver aids? I think so. The data collected by the IIHS from insurance companies and other sources seems to support the idea that the "band-aids", contrary to making people worse drivers, are actually reducing the probability of an accident.
Have you ever had a close call backing up out of a parking stall? I certainly have, driving a smaller vehicle and having large pickups and/or SUVs parking on either side of you pretty much eliminates any ability to actually see what is coming up the parking lot lane not directly behind you and I don't see how any amount of careful driver training will give you the ability to see around a behemoth vehicle. You can pull out of the stall slowly, but you can't force a driver coming up the lane to drive cautiously or courteously and I'd rather completely avoid the accident in the first place instead of being in the position of saying "it was the other persons fault, their driving was poor"
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Indeed. Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.
More gadgets for the masses.
And the only way driver-less cars are going to sell is if they deliver on the promise of absolving the owner of any responsibility, otherwise, what's the point? They won't get me to my destination any faster. Won't cost me less than my current car. One could argue 'potentially safer' but then try selling that to someone that's never had an accident. And there will be plenty of accidents until the state of the art is perfected, so that's an uphill battle as well.
If one can't use their car as a rolling office during commute time, or summon it after a night out then why wouldn't I just call an Uber and put the driving 'responsibility' on someone/something else. And that's one more reason it'll be tough to integrate driverless fleets. Are you, being the only thing in the car with a SS number, willing to take the heat if something happens with a driver-less Uber?
This is where both insurance and the law are going to have to keep pace with the tech. Better add another decade or two to the estimate.
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And the only way driver-less cars are going to sell is if they deliver on the promise of absolving the owner of any responsibility, otherwise, what's the point?
So that you don't have to spend your time driving and can do something else productive while traveling. Presumably driverless technology will have exponentially faster reaction time and hence will be better at avoiding the mistakes of other drivers. I personally look forward to the day I don't have to drive. Less stress, less accidents, more time. I trust my own driving, but I don't trust the driving of others -- that's the problem.
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And the only way driver-less cars are going to sell is if they deliver on the promise of absolving the owner of any responsibility, otherwise, what's the point?
So that you don't have to spend your time driving and can do something else productive while traveling.
Yep, exactly my point. I'd rather do something else while the car does the driving. But if I'm still on the hook for wreckless driving, speeding, manslaughter because of a hardware failure outside of my control, then this idea is still going to be a tough sell for the masses.
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Presumably driverless technology will have exponentially faster reaction time and hence will be better at avoiding the mistakes of other drivers.
And, currently, advertised as "driverless" tech manages to drive into semi trucks, lane dividers, stopped fire trucks...
Waymo's tech is more promising, but it requires highly detailed maps of a city, and (presumably) a small server farm in the back of each car. They've quite conspicuously avoided going with electric cars - and it's almost certainly because the power required to run the server farm containing a detailed 3d map of the city, and all the processing to handle all the sensors, draws so much power that you can't get a useful range out of an electric car. I wouldn't be surprised if they required 2-3kW of server hardware in the back of each car to accomplish their self driving, and a couple hundred TB of data, minimum. To get around Phoenix or Mountain View.
I think it's still over a decade out from being "generally useful" outside certain very constrained test markets, and likely closer to 2 decades from being able to operate without detailed maps - if it's even possible. Silicon Valley has a very distinct arrogance about their software skills - because they can operate competently in the purely synthetic software environment of the internet, they assume they have the skills to operate in reality, and they reliably screw this up - badly. Phones that die because the hardware is bad, cars that... are just crap drivers, self flying... wait, that was cancelled... the list goes on. They consistently very badly overestimate their ability to interface with reality.
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Presumably driverless technology will have exponentially faster reaction time and hence will be better at avoiding the mistakes of other drivers.
And, currently, advertised as "driverless" tech manages to drive into semi trucks, lane dividers, stopped fire trucks...
This is incorrect. The technology that has lead to the results you describe is not advertised as driverless tech. That is drivers abusing the tech and treating it as driverless when it is not.
At best, they have advertised that the cars can be configured this year with all the hardware necessary to have a fully driverless vehicle (which I don't know if that is accurate).
I wouldn't be surprised if they required 2-3kW of server hardware in the back of each car to accomplish their self driving, and a couple hundred TB of data, minimum. To get around Phoenix or Mountain View.
That is probably pretty close to reality for currently fielded systems.
The new Nvidia AI focused GPU that was just announced this year for autonomous vehicle use claims it can handle all the processing tasks at a power draw of 160Watts.
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Driverless accidents will make headlines even if they are statistically insignificant. Same goes for accidents involving any new tech like electric. Tesla makes the safest cars on the planet but you regularly read about any accident involving one. Of course the technology is still primitive. How far away are we from mature tech? Hard to say, probably depends on how much money is involved and how many players are competing -- the answer to that I'm guessing is "a lot". Decades seems like an overbid. I'm expecting less than 10 years.
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What "autonomous" systems aspire to do is make cars that adapt to conditions and make decisions. Or, you know, a form of A.I. And while we do have machine learning which takes big Data sets and tries to find matches, it's only kind of effective given good (and comprehensive) data and great feedback on accuracy. So you can point it at 2D photos and have little worker bees playing with your app and saying "hot or not!" and that's all well and good. But again, it's very hard to apply to reality, and when safety is involved, negative failed matches can result in injury or death. And it's not decision-making, which is a much more sophisticated form of intelligence than pattern-matching. A.I. is a mind-boggling problem, and if there's anything software developers are bad at, it's estimating how long it will take them to do something they haven't done before, even more so if no one has done it yet successfully. Of course, if no one spends money on developers, research and testing, no progress would be made. But throwing lots of money and bodies only ensures "some" progress is made, and not that we figure out how to create a new form of intelligence any time soon.
I'm not saying effective broadly useful autonomous driving needs fully developed artificial general intelligence, but even specific dedicated forms of artificial intelligence are very difficult to create for massively varied physical environments full of wildly unpredictable human behavior (and most likely, competing but somewhat different A.I.) And all of that not only has to reach really high levels of competency, but also fitting into the regulatory environment, staying cost-competitive, and convincing the mindshare of the masses.
It's going to take a while.
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I find all the talk about how driver-less cars will be better than people (driving) a bit disingenuous.
Automated cars will all tend to make the same mistakes. They have the same software, they'll have the same failure modes.
I'll be a lot more confident when there's some independent oversight instead of allowing manufacturers to self-certify. Before we allow these vehicles on the road, we should establish things like:
- liability. When a automated car is involved in a crash with (another automated) car, who is liable? Owner? Manufacturer?
- accuracy levels for sensors and features detectors and other key parts of the car. How reliably must a car detect a stop sign?
- critical failure points. For example, if the vehicle loses GPS, what is it supposed to do?
- discussion on emergency behaviour. Is the car allowed to make an emergency stop on a freeway?
and so on.
Automation for aviation has gone through all of this. We should be able to learn from this.
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Automation for aviation is an awful lot easier than for a car. There's a known flight path with known elevations. There's almost nothing up there to run into. If the TCAS kicks on because it has detected another aircraft nearby usually it just reverts control to the pilot.
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There will always be folks who opt for car ownership and maybe even stick with gas power but they will probably end up paying a significant premium in fuel, parking and insurance to do so.
Can you explain why there will be a "significant premium" for all of these things?
If lots of people are traveling in electric cars, why won't gasoline be cheap?
If not very many people need a parking spot, why will parking be expensive?
If everyone else is driving a super-safe autonomous vehicle, why will insurance premiums be high for a driver with an impeccable driving record? Additionally, why would insurance premiums not be substantially lower than they are now, even for someone insuring a car that is not autonomous?
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I find all the talk about how driver-less cars will be better than people (driving) a bit disingenuous.
Automated cars will all tend to make the same mistakes. They have the same software, they'll have the same failure modes.
I'll be a lot more confident when there's some independent oversight instead of allowing manufacturers to self-certify. Before we allow these vehicles on the road, we should establish things like:
- liability. When a automated car is involved in a crash with (another automated) car, who is liable? Owner? Manufacturer?
- accuracy levels for sensors and features detectors and other key parts of the car. How reliably must a car detect a stop sign?
- critical failure points. For example, if the vehicle loses GPS, what is it supposed to do?
- discussion on emergency behaviour. Is the car allowed to make an emergency stop on a freeway?
and so on.
Automation for aviation has gone through all of this. We should be able to learn from this.
While I don't believe they actually have any standards to follow, from what little I know auto manufacturers already follow procedures for software validation on these type of systems that at least matches TSO for aircraft.
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There will always be folks who opt for car ownership and maybe even stick with gas power but they will probably end up paying a significant premium in fuel, parking and insurance to do so.
Can you explain why there will be a "significant premium" for all of these things?
If lots of people are traveling in electric cars, why won't gasoline be cheap?
If not very many people need a parking spot, why will parking be expensive?
If everyone else is driving a super-safe autonomous vehicle, why will insurance premiums be high for a driver with an impeccable driving record? Additionally, why would insurance premiums not be substantially lower than they are now, even for someone insuring a car that is not autonomous?
Assuming an environment in which 95% of journeys are via extremely safe on-call electric vehicles (which I acknowledge is not a given):
-Gas stations pretty much cease to exist. Many will turn into convenience stores, or storage and charging sites for electric vehicles, but virtually none will continue to maintain gasoline tanks and pumps - it'll be far too high a cost for far too small a market. Some will survive, but they'll be few and far between - and their operating costs will be far higher as the distribution network they currently depend on withers away. You'll be left with substantial distances between stations, and so the few that remain will charge a high price.
-Parking will be expensive for the same reason: it won't be available. With virtually nobody owning a car, there's no reason to factor in parking spaces. Again, a few spots will remain, but most of it (especially in urban areas) will rapidly be repurposed, and the handful of spots that remain in good locations will, again, command a premium. Not as much as the gas stations (those guys will be able to really gouge drivers, as a lot of them simply won't have the fuel to get to an alternative station).
-Insurance will be expensive, as 99.9% of crashes will involve the 5% of cars that are manually driven. The accident rate will fall heavily, but as it falls alongside the manually driven share of the market, the population of people needing insurance and the population of people who crash will come closer and closer together. Let's imagine that the shift to electric cars eliminates 90% of road fatalities, and that the 99.9% figure I gave turns out to be accurate. The average manually driven car is now twice as likely to be involved in a fatal crash - the only way insurance doesn't rise is if accident rates fall far faster than the manually driven share of the market - and even if that happens, governments may opt for punitive measures against manual-driving holdouts. If every twenty manual cars off the road means one less death a year, governments would be out of their minds not to.
In this scenario, only the wealthiest members of society can afford to keep driving manual. At that point, we enter a world of pure premium pricing: everything to do with driving your own car might as well double in price, because nobody who drives their own car will be able to hide the fact that they're rich as all hell. On top of that, driving then becomes even more of an engine for conspicuous consumption.
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-Gas stations pretty much cease to exist. Many will turn into convenience stores, or storage and charging sites for electric vehicles, but virtually none will continue to maintain gasoline tanks and pumps - it'll be far too high a cost for far too small a market. Some will survive, but they'll be few and far between - and their operating costs will be far higher as the distribution network they currently depend on withers away. You'll be left with substantial distances between stations, and so the few that remain will charge a high price.
Today gas stations (in Norway at least) are used for buying gas, but also for coffee, fast food, sodas, candies, dinner ingredients, ice creams and restroom visits. If the gas part disappears, we'll need more places there you can buy all this shit, because we need at least some of this. Car passengers also need to stretch their legs from time to time, although you'll won't need the mental rest that you need today when your car drives you.
And what about electrical loading? Today loading a non-sports model Tesla takes approx. 20 minutes. If there are many cars in queue, you can have to wait for 20-40 minutes before it's your turn. How will they solve this in the future? Will we have comfortable loading stations, or will be transferred to another public car, including carrying our luggage to the new car? Or can we somehow swap to a full loaded battery package?
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-Gas stations pretty much cease to exist. Many will turn into convenience stores, or storage and charging sites for electric vehicles, but virtually none will continue to maintain gasoline tanks and pumps - it'll be far too high a cost for far too small a market. Some will survive, but they'll be few and far between - and their operating costs will be far higher as the distribution network they currently depend on withers away. You'll be left with substantial distances between stations, and so the few that remain will charge a high price.
Today gas stations (in Norway at least) are used for buying gas, but also for coffee, fast food, sodas, candies, dinner ingredients, ice creams and restroom visits. If the gas part disappears, we'll need more places there you can buy all this shit, because we need at least some of this. Car passengers also need to stretch their legs from time to time, although you'll won't need the mental rest that you need today when your car drives you.
And what about electrical loading? Today loading a non-sports model Tesla takes approx. 20 minutes. If there are many cars in queue, you can have to wait for 20-40 minutes before it's your turn. How will they solve this in the future? Will we have comfortable loading stations, or will be transferred to another public car, including carrying our luggage to the new car? Or can we somehow swap to a full loaded battery package?
I'd expect to see a substantial part of the non-gas aspect of those businesses to keep going. Charging will, I suspect, be a fairly rare occurrence: the vast majority of driving will have aa power outlet at the end of the journey, and so very few people will need to charge up. Those who do will probably be long-haul travellers, and so cafes and coffeeshops onsite will turn a 20-minute charge into a fairly pleasant break rather than a frustration. In urban areas, I'd expect to see gas stations turn into 24-hour shops and electric-vehicle parking and charging locations.
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Definitely two discussions here, maybe three... the progression of autonomous vehicles, the conversion from gasoline to electric, and the reduction in vehicle ownership as on-demand rentals improve.
I already think I addressed the software challenges being faced in reaching autonomy, which is a key component of reducing costs for on-demand vehicles. Given that, I also think that on-demand really has to be drastically cheaper than vehicle ownership, and vehicle ownership has to become a hardship. Otherwise, it won't happen. At least not in the "owning a car is 80% of how you express your status to your peers" mentality of the United States. I found an article from 2016 that states this:
The increase is slight: 9.1% of American households didn’t have a car in 2015, compared to 8.9% in 2010, a 0.2% change that represents about 500,000 households.0
OK, so it has begun to increase, but it has not been dramatic. Basically, the enlightened few that prefer bikes, mass-transit and on-demand cars have made the change, by choice. For that kind of thing to become mainstream, it not only has to be much less expensive to be on-demand, but it has to be better. More convenient. Less expensive, and not just a little. Maybe even recognized as something "better" people do, so valid as a social cue.
I think the shift to electric will happen much faster than the switch to autonomous, on-demand, ownership-less driving. But even that has a lot of hurdles to cross. It's easy to look at a sedan and see it being replaced by electric. And with that example proven enough to go mainstream, other examples can follow. But it was already pointed out that gasoline has huge advantages over batteries. It's a factor faster to refill. You can put it in a gas can and refill almost instantly for all the other things we use gas for: lawn care, forestry, power tools, etc. Look at landscaping companies. How many do you see that have an electric fleet of mowers and weed trimmers? Are snow plows and road crews using electric machines? And can they stop in the middle of their work to recharge for 20+ minutes (one would presume much longer for a battery packed snow plow!)? Many people even have gasoline generators for making their own electricity when the infrastructure fails them... All of these things will have to shift to majority electric before gasoline infrastructure starts to become less necessary, and can become sparse. Obviously we can envision a future of all-electric, autonomous tractor trailers, and once we move rapidly there, gas consumption will decrease quickly. But I don't believe we're going to see this happen rapidly, at least not for quite some time.
0After decades of decline, no-car households are becoming more common in the US (https://qz.com/873704/no-car-households-are-becoming-more-common-in-the-us-after-decades-of-decline/)
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I don't anticipate refuelling being nearly the problem some other people expect: there will be charging points at owners' homes, and eventually workplaces and shops. In a world where almost every journey ends at a refuelling point, how much of a need is there for intra-journey fuelling?
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No. It'll be a while before driverless cars can compete. :P
(https://i.imgur.com/aDaPmpc.png)
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No. It'll be a while before driverless cars can compete. :P
(https://i.imgur.com/aDaPmpc.png)
I may be misquided, but it seems to me that this is kind of the wrong forum for depictions of stomping on and despoiling a beautiful forested area with a 4000lb+ machine burning an explosive and toxic fuel.
Having said that - autonomous vehicles have already conquered Pikes Peak, not sure if the time to complete was competitive though.
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I may be misquided, but it seems to me that this is kind of the wrong forum for depictions of stomping on and despoiling a beautiful forested area with a 4000lb+ machine burning an explosive and toxic fuel.
Having said that - autonomous vehicles have already conquered Pikes Peak, not sure if the time to complete was competitive though.
Ah yes, I'm on MMM - where having kids and international travel are awesome, but responsibly doing any motorsport activities are somehow the worst thing ever. The environmentalist priorities here are fucking weird.
Anyway, you misspelled "driving on an established and legal trail." I didn't see any hikers or cyclists clearing fallen trees from the trail -- if you want to play that elitist snobby game with me, come back when you're packing a chainsaw and trash bags to leave the trails better off than when you found them.
My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future. Take that as you will.
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I don't believe that removing trees that have fallen would improve any hike I've ever been on. People are made to move. Moving over and around nature is part of what hiking is all about.
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I don't believe that removing trees that have fallen would improve any hike I've ever been on. People are made to move. Moving over and around nature is part of what hiking is all about.
These are legally classified as roads. Hiking, biking, snowmobiles, etc. And apparently used for drinking, given the plethora of beer cans/bottles/etc that are strewn everywhere...
Anyway, to the point of this topic -- I am not afraid my (used) car's value will be ruined by the driverless car. My use case is not normal.
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My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future. Take that as you will.
8 year old technology:
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/ (https://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/)
Also, some use cases aren't worth pursuing. Take that as you will.
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There's really two threads here. Do electric vehicles and/or autonomous driving vehicles affect a future car's value?
Yes to both, and I've already said I won't be buying a non-electric car ever again partially for that reason. I'm driving my 2 gas cars into the ground.
I own an electric car that I've had for 45k miles. I've changed a cabin air filter. It's better and cheaper in every way vs the econobox car it replaced, even amortizing for what I paid over 10 years. The only problem is the range, but I'm sure that will be solved in 10 years.
As for autonomous vehicles, people tend to assume technology as a linear progression when it's exponential. Could google of today have existed 10 years ago? No. It's running on the latest generation of servers in data farms that didn't even exist back then. 10 years ago, you would be right in saying google of today would not be technically possible. The future technology is not taken in isolation - while autonomous driving software improves, everything else is also improving - hardware, software, infrastructure. That's why it's exponential.
Just think how long 10 years is. 10 years ago, the first iPhone came out. Just think about that.
And for prices for non-electric non-autonomous vehicles to collapse, it does not require every new car sold to be electric + autonomous. The replacement rate on houses is approximately 4% per year. But during the financial crisis when housing supply increased to 8%, prices dropped by half in 2009. I would argue that auto demand is inelastic, and thus extremely sensitive to increases in supply. If prices decline, people don't buy 4 or 5 cars because they're cheap. They also don't sell in that manner.
But it gets worse than that. A decrease in the cost of transportation may not lead to a 2-3% increase in used cars coming onto the market. It may be virtually no change for quite a while and then within a couple year window, huge numbers.
If total cost of ownership of a gas car is $0.30/mile and the electric+autonomous car is $1/mile, would you want one? What if it was $0.9/mile? No change. What about $0.31/mile, then you might think about it. What if it's $0.20/mile? I bet you would very much consider it all of a sudden. Wouldn't everybody think that at the same time? What happens when everyone tries dumping their car in the span of a few years?
The human brain likes to see a linear pattern when in fact technology behaves in an exponential manner. I think 10 years is an eternity for technology like this.
Lastly, as for people 'choosing' not to buy one because they're uncomfortable with a computer driving them, that's not how America works. 70% of the population has no savings and is one paycheck away from being homeless. If it's cheaper to rely on ride sharing, the moment they lose their job, they will sell their car (or it will get repossessed) and they will live with autonomous cars. If it truly is cheaper/better, they won't go back. This is how the transition will happen. People will be economically forced into it, not by the government.
Exception: People in rural areas with low population density may not be affected by this because the TCO may never become cheaper. But their existence does not negate the effect on the used car market of the other 90% of the population.
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What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?
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What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?
GPS navigation, running your phone, providing software solutions to your business in a lot of cases, playing music and TV wirelessly in your house, smart filtering your email, offering a pretty good live translation service, providing a far better search system, renting films to you over the internet, enabling you to pay for things without a card, remotely controlling the heating and lighting systems in your home...
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Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.
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Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.
There is no way Google was producing better search results in 2008 than now.
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No, because driverless cars rely on knowing what the road is supposed to look like. It will be a long time before they can deal with roads that have snow on them over five months of the year. By then my relatively new car will be old and I won't care. I only have a relatively new car because, after 19 years, my old car was dying.
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What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?
GPS navigation, running your phone, providing software solutions to your business in a lot of cases, playing music and TV wirelessly in your house, smart filtering your email, offering a pretty good live translation service, providing a far better search system, renting films to you over the internet, enabling you to pay for things without a card, remotely controlling the heating and lighting systems in your home...
Don't have a GPS. Don't have a phone. My business doesn't use Google for software solutions. Don't stream audio or video from the internet. Don't need a live translation service. Don't rent films over the internet. Don't pay for things without a card. Don't remotely control heating/lighting in my home (why the fuck would anyone need this?)
So basically, they filter my email and provide a pretty good search system for the internet. They were doing that 10 years ago though. :P
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If my car was worth more than like a hundred bucks I would be ;P.
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Indeed. Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.
More gadgets for the masses.
It has the potential to be >nearly< perfectly efficient (as opposed to cars that sit unused 95% of the time), perfectly safe (google traffic deaths per year), and save humanity immense time that would otherwise be spent staring at a road.
Sure it would be nice if everyone would just bike, live in a small community and adopt the MMM way. Perfect is the enemy of good though right?
Obviously a complicated subject, and it has its risks like humans using it more to increase sprawl, increasing drive times, obesity, pollution etc. I'm not sure if that will lead to a net positive or negative. Overall though innovation and our ability to forever optimize, seems like the primary difference between us and the beasts.
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I actually forgot - Google have made a pretty decent first pass at a Babel fish. That's pretty staggering: they took a joke about the most useful thing in the universe and decided they could probably hammer together a prototype.
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What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?
GPS navigation, running your phone, providing software solutions to your business in a lot of cases, playing music and TV wirelessly in your house, smart filtering your email, offering a pretty good live translation service, providing a far better search system, renting films to you over the internet, enabling you to pay for things without a card, remotely controlling the heating and lighting systems in your home...
It also has a pretty sweet smart speaker infrastructure where you can install whole home synched audio for a few hundred bucks in literally less than an hour(they also do most of the above things, just by talking to them). Wonder what that would have cost in 2008?
I actually forgot - Google have made a pretty decent first pass at a Babel fish. That's pretty staggering: they took a joke about the most useful thing in the universe and decided they could probably hammer together a prototype.
If I'm not mistaken google's new headphones have this functionality baked in. They dont make a smart towel yet though :\.
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Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.
There is no way Google was producing better search results in 2008 than now.
Says who? Google was producing perfectly useful search results well before 2008. Indeed, more useful because you didn’t have to wade through all the Sponsored sites to get to the actual search results. I seriously just said to my dh how I miss the older google! And I’m not interested in any of that extra stuff - it’s like so many other devices that do 25 things I don’t care about.
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My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future. Take that as you will.
8 year old technology:
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/ (https://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/)
Also, some use cases aren't worth pursuing. Take that as you will.
Pike's Peak is a pavement/gravel road that race cars run - very different. Anyway, some people like driving off road, some people like hiking, some people like collecting college degrees, some people like brewing beer, and some people like sitting in movie theaters. "Worth pursuing" is objective.
Indeed. Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.
More gadgets for the masses.
It has the potential to be >nearly< perfectly efficient (as opposed to cars that sit unused 95% of the time), perfectly safe (google traffic deaths per year), and save humanity immense time that would otherwise be spent staring at a road.
Sure it would be nice if everyone would just bike, live in a small community and adopt the MMM way. Perfect is the enemy of good though right?
Obviously a complicated subject, and it has its risks like humans using it more to increase sprawl, increasing drive times, obesity, pollution etc. I'm not sure if that will lead to a net positive or negative. Overall though innovation and our ability to forever optimize, seems like the primary difference between us and the beasts.
I don't think that would happen unless we were able to break away from the typical 9-5 schedule. Rush hour periods indicate that a significant portion of people need to be on the road at the same time, so my suspicion is that autonomous cars would also sit idle for much of the time. It would certainly be a dramatic improvement, though.
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"I don't use any of Google's new products" is not the same thing as "Google's products are not any more advanced than a decade ago". You may not use them, but they're vastly more advanced than they were in 2008.
Incidentally, a Spotify subscription and a Google Home speaker is a remarkably simple way to feel like you're in the distant future. I don't care how blasé people get, being able to tell a robot to play a particular song is goddamn incredible.
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I may be misquided, but it seems to me that this is kind of the wrong forum for depictions of stomping on and despoiling a beautiful forested area with a 4000lb+ machine burning an explosive and toxic fuel.
Having said that - autonomous vehicles have already conquered Pikes Peak, not sure if the time to complete was competitive though.
Ah yes, I'm on MMM - where having kids and international travel are awesome, but responsibly doing any motorsport activities are somehow the worst thing ever. The environmentalist priorities here are fucking weird.
Anyway, you misspelled "driving on an established and legal trail." I didn't see any hikers or cyclists clearing fallen trees from the trail -- if you want to play that elitist snobby game with me, come back when you're packing a chainsaw and trash bags to leave the trails better off than when you found them.
My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future. Take that as you will.
That pic could literally be the woods across the road from my stepfather's house.
That have a dirt road/ rocky path.
That he occasionally drives on to get things to the field on the other side.
(He owns the land too, so there's that.)
Lots of roads like that where I grew up.
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Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.
There is no way Google was producing better search results in 2008 than now.
Says who? Google was producing perfectly useful search results well before 2008. Indeed, more useful because you didn’t have to wade through all the Sponsored sites to get to the actual search results. I seriously just said to my dh how I miss the older google! And I’m not interested in any of that extra stuff - it’s like so many other devices that do 25 things I don’t care about.
A) The internet has grown by leaps and bounds since 2008, so producing the same search results is vastly more difficult
B) The search results are indeed better by leaps and bounds vs 2008, although you may not perceive it
C) By that logic, there has been no improvement in auto technology since the Model T because the Model T got you from point A to point B just like today's cars. Heck, even horses got you from point A to point B.
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There's a lot of talk in this thread about autonomous vehicles being safer than human-operated vehicles...less accidents, fewer fatalities. In fact, they can't be just 'as good as' today, they need to be better than today simply because they'll be less flexible than what they're replacing. And we can't assume there won't be new or unexpected types of accidents that would offset those we're seeking to eliminate.
I think we can also agree that the true test for these vehicles before they're ready for prime-time is how they perform under real-world conditions, accumulating miles traveled without incident. And this is what just about every car company banking on this tech has been doing. And therein lies the problem.
According to the Rand Corporation, to statistically demonstrate a 20% reduction in driver fatalities from today's 1.09 per 100 million miles, it would take approximately 5 billion miles of autonomous driving to do so.
"With a fleet of 100 autonomous vehicles test driven 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at an average speed of 25 miles per hour, this would take about 225 years."
Not mentioned in the report, but discussed earlier this week (I work for a company tangentially involved in automation) is that the only way this 'demonstration' will be achievable is through computer simulation. BMW believes 95% of proving the AI will have to be done with software. That puts the onus less on the vehicle and more on the confidence level of the vehicle simulation.
Link to the Report: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1478/RAND_RR1478.pdf
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"With a fleet of 100 autonomous vehicles test driven 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at an average speed of 25 miles per hour, this would take about 225 years."
Waymo has close to 100,000 vehicles on order from Chrysler and Jaguar and the roll-out of their driverless taxi service in Phoenix is imminent. That should cut down significantly on the amount of time it will take for them to reach five billion miles. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong forcing them to halt the service.
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No. When I bought my current vehicle new 6 years ago (pre mustache), I told my father that it was going to be the last gas vehicle that I would own. I will drive this one into the ground, then the next car I get will be electric, and the following one will be self driving, and quite possibly the last car I ever own. I am not worried about my current car, or the next one for that matter. I still believe my prediction to be true, if anything, my next car may likely be electric and have at least partial self drive capable.
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Driverless cars don't have to be safer. I would argue that for many people, they would rather spend their attention reading a book or watching a show vs spending it on driving to get some tiny incremental benefit in safety.
If I have to spend 250 hours/year to reduce my chance at a car accident from 0.001% to 0.0001%, not everyone is willing to make that sacrifice.
Long term it's a moot point; driverless cars will be safer. If computers can beat humans at chess and go, they can figure out how not to collide with other objects while moving. It is only a matter of time. It's not like international diplomacy or something truly complicated - this is a very solvable problem with clear rules and parameters for optimization.
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I find all the talk about how driver-less cars will be better than people (driving) a bit disingenuous.
Automated cars will all tend to make the same mistakes. They have the same software, they'll have the same failure modes.
I'll be a lot more confident when there's some independent oversight instead of allowing manufacturers to self-certify. Before we allow these vehicles on the road, we should establish things like:
- liability. When a automated car is involved in a crash with (another automated) car, who is liable? Owner? Manufacturer?
- accuracy levels for sensors and features detectors and other key parts of the car. How reliably must a car detect a stop sign?
- critical failure points. For example, if the vehicle loses GPS, what is it supposed to do?
- discussion on emergency behaviour. Is the car allowed to make an emergency stop on a freeway?
and so on.
Automation for aviation has gone through all of this. We should be able to learn from this.
While I don't believe they actually have any standards to follow, from what little I know auto manufacturers already follow procedures for software validation on these type of systems that at least matches TSO for aircraft.
Do you have a reference? I would like to read up on it.
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Incidentally, I was speaking to someone today who had a startup in 2007 focused on location-specific search, because at that point searching for "bike shop in Longmont" didn't produce useful results.
There is no way that era of search was superior to what we have now.
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But it doesn’t have to be “superior “ - it just has to be “good enough”.
The question is - will self driving cars be so vastly superior to today’s system that no one will want a “regular” car? And my answer is - not in the next 5 years, they won’t. A lot of the scenarios offered here seem like arguments *against* self driving fleets of cars. Who wants to ride around in a car designed to be impervious to other passengers making a mess of it? Who wants to call a vehicle and wait 10 minutes every time?
That system saves you time if you live in a dense city center where driving is slow and inconvenient, but it becomes far less appealing as soon as you get even to the suburbs. And don’t discount the issues of transporting children around - it’s not so easy to get an uber with a car seat much less make the multiple trips/day parents often make.
I think it’s going to be a slower process. I’ve been waiting a long time for flying cars, too.
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Perhaps in a year or two you will be able to purchase an upgrade kit for your existing car to make it driverless. Oh wait, you can buy it now!
https://newatlas.com/xmatik-lanecruise-self-driving-kit/52257/ (https://newatlas.com/xmatik-lanecruise-self-driving-kit/52257/)
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Incidentally, I was speaking to someone today who had a startup in 2007 focused on location-specific search, because at that point searching for "bike shop in Longmont" didn't produce useful results.
There is no way that era of search was superior to what we have now.
I remember a time in the early 90s where I was looking for a bike shop . . . so I performed a location-specific search using "Yellow Pages" technology and was able to immediately find what I was looking for. The internet is great and all, and has made some things more convenient . . . but many forget that an awful lot of the stuff you can do on the internet was already a solved problem ages ago. :P
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But it doesn’t have to be “superior “ - it just has to be “good enough”.
The question is - will self driving cars be so vastly superior to today’s system that no one will want a “regular” car? And my answer is - not in the next 5 years, they won’t. A lot of the scenarios offered here seem like arguments *against* self driving fleets of cars. Who wants to ride around in a car designed to be impervious to other passengers making a mess of it? Who wants to call a vehicle and wait 10 minutes every time?
That system saves you time if you live in a dense city center where driving is slow and inconvenient, but it becomes far less appealing as soon as you get even to the suburbs. And don’t discount the issues of transporting children around - it’s not so easy to get an uber with a car seat much less make the multiple trips/day parents often make.
I think it’s going to be a slower process. I’ve been waiting a long time for flying cars, too.
These are good points. There are already car sharing services in cities that are cheaper than owning a car for occasional use. Honestly though, I wish these existing services were priced more competitively and more widely available. We don't need self-driving tech to disrupt the existing ownership model which has these large-expensive machines sitting there idle 90+% of the time.
I do think that eventually, a competitively priced car sharing self-driving cars would make it much easier to go 1 car per household or go car-less even in cities and even suburbs and especially if one is willing to bike at least some of the time.
I do think that a lot of the features that are a prerequisite for self driving will become standard in most models over the next five or so years i.e. emergency braking, adaptive cruise, lane departure controls. And if these feature make a vehicle safer and less costly to insure then yeah, it will be like airbags and ABS and you'll be hard pressed to find a car that doesn't have it.
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Incidentally, I was speaking to someone today who had a startup in 2007 focused on location-specific search, because at that point searching for "bike shop in Longmont" didn't produce useful results.
There is no way that era of search was superior to what we have now.
I remember a time in the early 90s where I was looking for a bike shop . . . so I performed a location-specific search using "Yellow Pages" technology and was able to immediately find what I was looking for. The internet is great and all, and has made some things more convenient . . . but many forget that an awful lot of the stuff you can do on the internet was already a solved problem ages ago. :P
But but but think of all the internet advertising revenue that was foregone.
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I remember a time in the early 90s where I was looking for a bike shop . . . so I performed a location-specific search using "Yellow Pages" technology and was able to immediately find what I was looking for. The internet is great and all, and has made some things more convenient . . . but many forget that an awful lot of the stuff you can do on the internet was already a solved problem ages ago. :P
I'm admittedly old enough to remember that. God I hated having to use the phone book. Google is so much better in every way compared to using that atrocity.
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Indeed, Google is much more efficient at harvesting personal information and selling it to companies.
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Indeed, Google is much more efficient at harvesting personal information and selling it to companies.
Yep. I don't mind. I'm okay with the arrangement.
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We don't need self-driving tech to disrupt the existing ownership model which has these large-expensive machines sitting there idle 90+% of the time.
Other than parking, I don't see how putting 300k miles on a car in a year and it requiring replacement will somehow be radically cheaper than putting the same number of miles on more cars over more years. Relatively few things in a car fail from age - far more mileage/engine hours related.
Also, currently, cars rarely drive deadhead miles. Self driving/ride sharing/etc involves a lot of deadhead miles - which uses more energy and will wear cars out faster for the same number of "payload miles."
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Well the parking thing is huge. Idle cars take up a lot space. For example, it would free up more space for bikes in my garage 😁 Also, less trucks and SUVs since they are typically purchased for capabilities which are rarely needed.
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There will always be folks who opt for car ownership and maybe even stick with gas power but they will probably end up paying a significant premium in fuel, parking and insurance to do so.
Can you explain why there will be a "significant premium" for all of these things?
If lots of people are traveling in electric cars, why won't gasoline be cheap?
If not very many people need a parking spot, why will parking be expensive?
If everyone else is driving a super-safe autonomous vehicle, why will insurance premiums be high for a driver with an impeccable driving record? Additionally, why would insurance premiums not be substantially lower than they are now, even for someone insuring a car that is not autonomous?
Assuming an environment in which 95% of journeys are via extremely safe on-call electric vehicles (which I acknowledge is not a given):
-Gas stations pretty much cease to exist. Many will turn into convenience stores, or storage and charging sites for electric vehicles, but virtually none will continue to maintain gasoline tanks and pumps - it'll be far too high a cost for far too small a market. Some will survive, but they'll be few and far between - and their operating costs will be far higher as the distribution network they currently depend on withers away. You'll be left with substantial distances between stations, and so the few that remain will charge a high price.
-Parking will be expensive for the same reason: it won't be available. With virtually nobody owning a car, there's no reason to factor in parking spaces. Again, a few spots will remain, but most of it (especially in urban areas) will rapidly be repurposed, and the handful of spots that remain in good locations will, again, command a premium. Not as much as the gas stations (those guys will be able to really gouge drivers, as a lot of them simply won't have the fuel to get to an alternative station).
-Insurance will be expensive, as 99.9% of crashes will involve the 5% of cars that are manually driven. The accident rate will fall heavily, but as it falls alongside the manually driven share of the market, the population of people needing insurance and the population of people who crash will come closer and closer together. Let's imagine that the shift to electric cars eliminates 90% of road fatalities, and that the 99.9% figure I gave turns out to be accurate. The average manually driven car is now twice as likely to be involved in a fatal crash - the only way insurance doesn't rise is if accident rates fall far faster than the manually driven share of the market - and even if that happens, governments may opt for punitive measures against manual-driving holdouts. If every twenty manual cars off the road means one less death a year, governments would be out of their minds not to.
In this scenario, only the wealthiest members of society can afford to keep driving manual. At that point, we enter a world of pure premium pricing: everything to do with driving your own car might as well double in price, because nobody who drives their own car will be able to hide the fact that they're rich as all hell. On top of that, driving then becomes even more of an engine for conspicuous consumption.
I in no way think gas stations are going to cease to exist anytime soon. Maybe in 50-60 years at the earliest.
As fewer and fewer people use gasoline, it will become cheaper. Only the oil with the lowest marginal cost will need to be extracted and this will help lower the cost. Even if some gas stations do close down, there will still be gas stations that serve fewer people. Since demand has shifted left, they aren't going to have some great market power to charge high prices for gasoline. Also, even if 95% of trips are electric, that is still a lot of driving that is not electric. There will still be a need for gas stations and the distribution network isn't going to go away.
If there aren't that many people needing a parking spot, parking spots won't be able to charge a premium. If there is a corresponding decrease in demand, price could stay the same or even go down. There is nothing to suggest parking will cost a premium except your conjecture (and seeming hope).
In terms of insurance, as you stated, if the accident rate goes way down, insurance is going to be much cheaper than it is today. Manually driven cars may cost more to insure than autonomous vehicles, but they will cost much less to insure than cars today. It's kind of like how vaccination protects everyone through herd immunity. Moreover, if manually driven cars have safety features to reduce accidents, that will further lower insurance rates relative to today.
I highly doubt governments are going to enact some punitive measures against people that drive their own cars. That seems more like something you want to happen than something that will actually happen.
Overall, driving your own car is not going to cost you more than today and will not involve premium pricing meaning it is not likely that only the wealthy will be able to do so.
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Gas: It is already much cheaper to fuel a car with electricity vs gas and I assume (and hope) there will soon be a surcharge (and dividend?) on carbon emissions in places where there isn't already. It's our best shot at fighting global warming.
Parking: My thought was that reduced demand would result in many of the privately owned lots being developed into something more profitable but I could be wrong. I also assumed that some of the street parking would be repurposed into protected bike lanes, sidewalks and green space which people are already advocating for.
Insurance: I think we agree here.
Only time will tell I guess...
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I highly doubt governments are going to enact some punitive measures against people that drive their own cars. That seems more like something you want to happen than something that will actually happen.
Right, but... it's a way to say, "You know, poor people suck and we'd rather them not get anywhere outside their little corners we've allocated!" without having to say that!
You can drive a car incredibly cheaply, if you're willing to work on it yourself. Which, if you're driving cheap cars, is basically required. The only way I got home to visit family for a long period of my life was because I was willing to find cheap cars ($100-$300), work on them myself (because, you know, a shop bill totals the car), stack coupons (4 new tires for $120 installed because the cashier couldn't come up with any reason I couldn't stack all this stuff? Yes, please!), and generally run very, very cheaply.
I wasn't going to be affording a self driving car going 350 miles. I drove a variety of tin cans that got 30-45mpg highway ($150 is a lot cheaper than a Prius). But, hey, if you can't afford the Sharing Ecosystem, well... you know, die off under a bridge, please.
Overall, driving your own car is not going to cost you more than today and will not involve premium pricing meaning it is not likely that only the wealthy will be able to do so.
Correct. And those who still wish to do so won't be sharing roads with people who absolutely do not wish to do so. If someone just can't get their nose out of Facebook long enough to watch the road, great. They can order a self driving car. And the rest of us won't have to worry about that person blowing stop signs.
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I remember a time in the early 90s where I was looking for a bike shop . . . so I performed a location-specific search using "Yellow Pages" technology and was able to immediately find what I was looking for. The internet is great and all, and has made some things more convenient . . . but many forget that an awful lot of the stuff you can do on the internet was already a solved problem ages ago. :P
I'm admittedly old enough to remember that. God I hated having to use the phone book. Google is so much better in every way compared to using that atrocity.
I don't understand how short people see over the steering wheel any more in this day and age. At one point the phone book solved all those problems. :P
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I don't understand how short people see over the steering wheel any more in this day and age. At one point the phone book solved all those problems. :P
I'm 5'6". We drive small people cars :).
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I changed my mind. I now think we will all be riding around on dockless e-scooters in 5 months.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/driverless-car-hype-gives-way-e-scooter-mania-among-technorati-n919706
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Hah, those won't work up here in the winter either!
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I have zero worries to the OP's question as I lease.
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I have zero worries to the OP's question as I lease.
Hopefully under a business, otherwise yikes
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I have zero worries to the OP's question as I lease.
Hopefully under a business, otherwise yikes
People either get the math on leasing or they don't. Those that do realize it's the best way to utilize the portion of the useful life span of that depreciating asset you want and not be burdened by the cost or risk of taking on the entire useful lifespan. I don't want more than the first three or four years of that lifespan so leasing makes the most sense. If I wanted to drive an old car buying would make sense.
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People either get the math on leasing or they don't.
Oh I think we get the math. It works out just as well (and usually worse) as buying a brand new car. Which is to say, its a horrible financial choice to make. Absolutely terrible. It's just bleeding money in huge amounts. You're essentially wasting a ton of money on a very expensive luxury. If you're already FI, and don't care about the expense, it's fine. Otherwise, it deserves massive face punches.
Now under a business, it can sometimes make sense as a tax deduction.
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People either get the math on leasing or they don't.
I know! It's awesome! Some other sucker pays out of pocket for the early lifespan depreciation on a car, and gets all sorts of restrictions on what they can do, how far they can drive, etc, and then you get to buy a few-year old off-lease car for a bargain!
... sorry, what site are we on again? Leasing a new car?
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I was reading/watching this, and it got me interested:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-03/gm-s-cruise-draws-2-75-billion-from-honda-in-self-driving-pact
I'd be very worried that my new car would become obsolete in a few years. I'm going to do the Moustachian thing and keep driving my 2003, 165K mileage VW.
The last vehicle I bought was brand new but I don't worry about it depreciating because I plan to keep it 30 years.
I keep it in mechanically excellent condition but don't care about washing or polishing it or that it has a cracked windshield.
The only thing I care about is its reliability.
I only drive about ~ 3000 miles per year.
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We don't need self-driving tech to disrupt the existing ownership model which has these large-expensive machines sitting there idle 90+% of the time.
Other than parking, I don't see how putting 300k miles on a car in a year and it requiring replacement will somehow be radically cheaper than putting the same number of miles on more cars over more years. Relatively few things in a car fail from age - far more mileage/engine hours related.
People are saying electric cars will be good for 1,000,000 miles with minimal maintenance. If that is indeed the case, that is a game change with maintenance. If you drive a typical 10k miles/year, the car will be a pile of rust in 100 years. With 300k miles per year, that car would be depleted in a few years.
It also enables much faster design iterations and improvements. That benefit is hard to quantify exactly, but imagine if for gas cars the government mandated 50mpg cars and within a few years almost all cars would be getting 50mpg rather than being stuck with those 20mpg old cars for the next 30 years. This goes for all reliability/efficiency improvements such as self driving tech improvements, safety equipment, build quality/interior, etc.... It could lead to an explosion in innovation because the replacement cycle is so quick. Think smartphones vs airplanes for innovation speed.
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I'd be very worried that my new car would become obsolete in a few years.
I don't care about the dollar value of my car since I'm driving it, not selling it.
I don't think driverless cars will become a serious thing because of the safety issue. Recently in the US a woman got a driverless Uber and it struck and killed a pedestrian while she was messing about on her mobile phone. She's been charged - she should, the prosecutor says, have been paying attention and intervened. Which makes us wonder WTF she was paying for? The driverless cars do have safety systems to stop but they produce a lot of false positives, jolting the passengers around, so the company turns them off and tells the passengers to be ready to intervene.
People will pay for extra features and service, they won't pay extra for nothing. If I have to be paying constant attention while the car is driving, then I may as well just drive the damn thing myself.
The safety thing will always be an issue because we trust human judgement but not machine judgement. If to avoid a pedestrian I swerve my car into another car, people say "oh well, he had to do it." If a machine does that then everyone gets upset.
Machines are dumb. I can't even type out a whole post on this site without my browser freezing up on my laptop, I'm not putting the thing in charge of 1,000kg of steel and plastic going at 100km/hr. Yes, many humans are dumber than machines, but again - we accept that. Plus humans are free, we have to pay for machines, so we expect better.
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Recently in the US a woman got a driverless Uber and it struck and killed a pedestrian while she was messing about on her mobile phone. She's been charged - she should, the prosecutor says, have been paying attention and intervened. Which makes us wonder WTF she was paying for?
Not quite.
She was the safety-driver. Not a passenger.
It was her job to be alert and intervene.
(Though there's much to be said about the near impossibility of being alert and doing nothing for thousands of miles on end, and then having to intervene in a fraction of a second. ... As well as much to be said about Uber's corner-cutting safety practices.)
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People are saying electric cars will be good for 1,000,000 miles with minimal maintenance. If that is indeed the case, that is a game change with maintenance. If you drive a typical 10k miles/year, the car will be a pile of rust in 100 years. With 300k miles per year, that car would be depleted in a few years.
No, the claims are usually about the drivetrain. Not the rest of the car. I don't know if you've owned many high mileage cars, but it's quite common for the drivetrain to be perfectly functional at 250k miles, while the rest of the car is falling apart around it. That's just wear and tear from use, people getting in and out (of, in this case, likely "not their car"), road miles, etc. There's a lot more than a motor to a car, trust me. I've repaired most of it in my era of cheap cars that other people were getting rid of (and I figured I could get another 20k miles out of).
Think smartphones vs airplanes for innovation speed.
I like the slow pace of aircraft innovation, because it tends to prevent the sort of "Oh, yeah, sorry, that phone was totally faulty and will die in a year and a half, well, just go buy a new one... besides, you're no longer getting updates..." nonsense of the smartphone world.
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My primary car is a 2003 Jeep Liberty - value- not much
project car Suzuki LJ81 pickup truck - value - 5-10k'
I look forward to the day when the majority of cars are autonomous. I can drive as I please and they will move out of the way to avoid DANGER.
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The last vehicle I bought was brand new but I don't worry about it depreciating because I plan to keep it 30 years.
I keep it in mechanically excellent condition but don't care about washing or polishing it or that it has a cracked windshield.
The only thing I care about is its reliability.
I only drive about ~ 3000 miles per year.
You might want to brake hard from time to time, so that your brakes won't get rusty.
Edit: corrected wrong formatting.
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We don't need self-driving tech to disrupt the existing ownership model which has these large-expensive machines sitting there idle 90+% of the time.
Other than parking, I don't see how putting 300k miles on a car in a year and it requiring replacement will somehow be radically cheaper than putting the same number of miles on more cars over more years. Relatively few things in a car fail from age - far more mileage/engine hours related.
Also, currently, cars rarely drive deadhead miles. Self driving/ride sharing/etc involves a lot of deadhead miles - which uses more energy and will wear cars out faster for the same number of "payload miles."
If you put huge amounts of mileage on one car, but the rest of the car is still in good shape, then it's worthwhile to only replace the drive train/parts. People care about how cars look like modern features and stuff. But if those parts are still good and up to date; just replace the drive train and not the entire car is certainly a better option. With car sharing you are more likely to wear out the drive train then the car getting outdated.
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People either get the math on leasing or they don't.
Oh I think we get the math. It works out just as well (and usually worse) as buying a brand new car. Which is to say, its a horrible financial choice to make. Absolutely terrible. It's just bleeding money in huge amounts. You're essentially wasting a ton of money on a very expensive luxury. If you're already FI, and don't care about the expense, it's fine. Otherwise, it deserves massive face punches.
Now under a business, it can sometimes make sense as a tax deduction.
So this thread is about risk in the used car market. I face zero risk due to my lease...which is of course, one of the benefits of leasing. I'm always in warranty, no unexpected costs, included roadside assistance, all the latest safety features to keep my family safe...it's pretty nice.
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People either get the math on leasing or they don't.
I know! It's awesome! Some other sucker pays out of pocket for the early lifespan depreciation on a car, and gets all sorts of restrictions on what they can do, how far they can drive, etc, and then you get to buy a few-year old off-lease car for a bargain!
... sorry, what site are we on again? Leasing a new car?
Yes, I'm a sucker. It must feel nice to be so superior. You have no idea my net worth, income, etc. but just jump to this conclusion.
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People either get the math on leasing or they don't.
I know! It's awesome! Some other sucker pays out of pocket for the early lifespan depreciation on a car, and gets all sorts of restrictions on what they can do, how far they can drive, etc, and then you get to buy a few-year old off-lease car for a bargain!
... sorry, what site are we on again? Leasing a new car?
Yes, I'm a sucker. It must feel nice to be so superior. You have no idea my net worth, income, etc. but just jump to this conclusion.
If you dig a pit in your back yard, shovel some hundred dollar bills, then light them on fire . . . it doesn't matter if you make 20k a year or 20 million. What you're doing (while it may be fun) is not an efficient use of money. Net worth and income shouldn't really come into play when considering sound financial decisions . . . a bad decision for a poor person is still a bad decision for a rich person (you can just get away with making more bad decisions if you're rich).
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If you dig a pit in your back yard, shovel some hundred dollar bills, then light them on fire . . . it doesn't matter if you make 20k a year or 20 million. What you're doing (while it may be fun) is not an efficient use of money. Net worth and income shouldn't really come into play when considering sound financial decisions . . . a bad decision for a poor person is still a bad decision for a rich person (you can just get away with making more bad decisions if you're rich).
Again, this depreciating asset has a useful lifespan. I only want to access the first 3-4 years of this lifespan and the math and other factors indicate leasing is the most cost efficient way to do this. Again, as I said above when I started getting personally attacked, if you want to drive the same car for a long time, buying makes sense. My decision is financially sound given the premise I don't want my wife and myself to drive old cars for various reasons including safety, reliability, service experience, and I can 100% quantify my auto expenses which makes budgeting easy and accurate.
I don't expect many folks here to back my choice, as leasing is a HUGE kneejerk response here, but neither do I expect to get called names or told I'm of substandard intelligence.
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If you dig a pit in your back yard, shovel some hundred dollar bills, then light them on fire . . . it doesn't matter if you make 20k a year or 20 million. What you're doing (while it may be fun) is not an efficient use of money. Net worth and income shouldn't really come into play when considering sound financial decisions . . . a bad decision for a poor person is still a bad decision for a rich person (you can just get away with making more bad decisions if you're rich).
Again, this depreciating asset has a useful lifespan. I only want to access the first 3-4 years of this lifespan and the math and other factors indicate leasing is the most cost efficient way to do this. Again, as I said above when I started getting personally attacked, if you want to drive the same car for a long time, buying makes sense. My decision is financially sound given the premise I don't want my wife and myself to drive old cars for various reasons including safety, reliability, service experience, and I can 100% quantify my auto expenses which makes budgeting easy and accurate.
I don't expect many folks here to back my choice, as leasing is a HUGE kneejerk response here, but neither do I expect to get called names or told I'm of substandard intelligence.
What safety, reliability, and service experience problems are you expecting with a 4 - 8 year old vehicle? It's possible that invalid initial assumptions are leading you to draw an erroneous conclusion.
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What safety, reliability, and service experience problems are you expecting with a 4 - 8 year old vehicle? It's possible that invalid initial assumptions are leading you to draw an erroneous conclusion.
Safety: new features are constantly coming out. Do many eight year old cars have adaptable cruise control? Accident avoidance, lane correction, self-driving features? Can you put a price on the safety of your spouse or children? I know I can't.
Reliability: it's just reality that as a car ages it becomes less reliable than it was previously. Wear and tear is a real thing. With reliability again comes safety as breaking down on the highway is not the most safe experience to be had.
Service: that's a bit more nebulous but they come to my office and pick up my car, service and wash it, then park it in my spot and give the keys to my secretary; similar for my wife's vehicle. All of this is done with no additional charge. If either of our vehicles needed to be in the shop more than the day a complimentary service loaner, of a new and comparable vehicle, is given to us with no charge. The SA we've had for the last 12 years or so delivers our new vehicles to the house if we want. He knows I know how to work leases and our deals are very transparent, and these days, done via text. No stress and I know the exact residual, MF, and cap cost going in.
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What safety, reliability, and service experience problems are you expecting with a 4 - 8 year old vehicle? It's possible that invalid initial assumptions are leading you to draw an erroneous conclusion.
Safety: new features are constantly coming out. Do many eight year old cars have adaptable cruise control? Accident avoidance, lane correction, self-driving features? Can you put a price on the safety of your spouse or children? I know I can't.
Reliability: it's just reality that as a car ages it becomes less reliable than it was previously. Wear and tear is a real thing. With reliability again comes safety as breaking down on the highway is not the most safe experience to be had.
Service: that's a bit more nebulous but they come to my office and pick up my car, service and wash it, then park it in my spot and give the keys to my secretary; similar for my wife's vehicle. All of this is done with no additional charge. If either of our vehicles needed to be in the shop more than the day a complimentary service loaner, of a new and comparable vehicle, is given to us with no charge. The SA we've had for the last 12 years or so delivers our new vehicles to the house if we want. He knows I know how to work leases and our deals are very transparent, and these days, done via text. No stress and I know the exact residual, MF, and cap cost going in.
Relevant MMM post: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/06/07/safety-is-an-expensive-illusion/
I have a friend who had a new car lemon law'd due to engine problems. I have another friend who had his CPO / warrantied vehicle towed at least once, if not more. Meanwhile, my 200k mile Lexus has yet to leave me stranded. I also got a loaner when I went in for a recall / warranty enhancement service because Lexus is awesome, but that's another story :)
New cars are nice - I get it. I really do. However, you pay for it. A lot.
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Relevant MMM post: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/06/07/safety-is-an-expensive-illusion/
I have a friend who had a new car lemon law'd due to engine problems. I have another friend who had his CPO / warrantied vehicle towed at least once, if not more. Meanwhile, my 200k mile Lexus has yet to leave me stranded. I also got a loaner when I went in for a recall / warranty enhancement service because Lexus is awesome, but that's another story :)
New cars are nice - I get it. I really do. However, you pay for it. A lot.
That post does not address my points above but rather the fatality rate per class of vehicle. With the features I mentioned above every class of vehicle that has them becomes safer. Also I think it's a pretty tortuous argument to say, as the link does, having to pay for a full size SUV runs the very real risk of ruining my health and thus my retirement. From what I can discern MMM drives low miles and mainly in a suburban setting. Make it more miles per year, to include highway and/or high speed surface roads like my driving, and the margin of safety only increases for me.
Again, and people keep ignoring it, I 100% agree buying a used car and driving it into the ground is the cheapest way to obtain transportation. I have worked my butt off to be in the position where I don't always have to make the cheapest choice and it's really, really nice to be in this position. I could have FI'ed years ago if I wanted to live an overly frugal life. I don't but it doesn't mean certain FI principles are not to be adopted and/or lauded. Not all of us are going to follow the MMM bible to the verse.
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If you go on the assumption that you will either buy a car every 3 years, or you will lease -- does the lease still come out ahead, all other things being equal?
Probably depends on the make, model, trim level, lease amenities, etc.
If you buy a $20k car, after 3 years, you can probably sell it for $14k. Maybe more. The same car might lease for $250/month or $9000. So unless initial start-up costs are more than $3k, the lease is more expensive. Those are completely made-up numbers. What are the real numbers for your year, make and model?
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If you go on the assumption that you will either buy a car every 3 years, or you will lease -- does the lease still come out ahead, all other things being equal?
Probably depends on the make, model, trim level, lease amenities, etc.
If you buy a $20k car, after 3 years, you can probably sell it for $14k. Maybe more. The same car might lease for $250/month or $9000. So unless initial start-up costs are more than $3k, the lease is more expensive. Those are completely made-up numbers. What are the real numbers for your year, make and model?
Yeah, I'm not getting into details, but I'll say for what we drive the auto producer likes to subsidize leases by giving outrageous residuals (often 60% or a bit more) and basically free credit, i.e. MFs equal to under 1% interest.
Which is a thing. Don't believe any salesperson that says leases don't use interest rates. Multiply the MF by 2400 and you've got the interest rate.
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If you go on the assumption that you will either buy a car every 3 years, or you will lease -- does the lease still come out ahead, all other things being equal?
Probably depends on the make, model, trim level, lease amenities, etc.
If you buy a $20k car, after 3 years, you can probably sell it for $14k. Maybe more. The same car might lease for $250/month or $9000. So unless initial start-up costs are more than $3k, the lease is more expensive. Those are completely made-up numbers. What are the real numbers for your year, make and model?
Yeah, I'm not getting into details, but I'll say for what we drive the auto producer likes to subsidize leases by giving outrageous residuals (often 60% or a bit more) and basically free credit, i.e. MFs equal to under 1% interest.
Which is a thing. Don't believe any salesperson that says leases don't use interest rates. Multiply the MF by 2400 and you've got the interest rate.
It sounds like you've got your leasing plans as optimized as they can be, given your desire to always drive the latest/greatest.
I do think it's a bit disingenuous to say things like "Can you put a price on the safety of your spouse or children? I know I can't." Why do you get 3 year leases instead of 1 year? Would you pay 30 million dollars to have access to 2019 safety features a year early in 2018?
My boss is a high-net-worth individual. "I'm meeting some friends in Gibraltar for the weekend" level. He just a few months ago replaced his 2008 Mercedes with a brand new ~100k Mercedes. He's not frugal by any means but I don't think he had any major issues with even a German car over only 10 years of life. 10 year old cars may have been significantly less reliable 20-30 years ago, but these days the only <10 year old car I've had issues with had over 200k miles on it.
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It sounds like you've got your leasing plans as optimized as they can be, given your desire to always drive the latest/greatest.
Thank you for stating this.
Why do you get 3 year leases instead of 1 year?
Math. The automakers create a sweet spot for leases in the 36-39 month area through, as stated above, subsidized residuals and interest.
My boss is a high-net-worth individual. "I'm meeting some friends in Gibraltar for the weekend" level. He just a few months ago replaced his 2008 Mercedes with a brand new ~100k Mercedes. He's not frugal by any means but I don't think he had any major issues with even a German car over only 10 years of life. 10 year old cars may have been significantly less reliable 20-30 years ago, but these days the only <10 year old car I've had issues with had over 200k miles on it.
Again, math. Well, more data. I don't make decisions based on anecdotes but rather on aggregated data when I can. I know vehicles with the latest safety features, unsurprisingly, are the safest vehicles.
So anyway, the OP question was do I worry about losing value in my vehicle due to driverless tech? Again, nope. ;)
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What safety, reliability, and service experience problems are you expecting with a 4 - 8 year old vehicle? It's possible that invalid initial assumptions are leading you to draw an erroneous conclusion.
Safety: new features are constantly coming out. Do many eight year old cars have adaptable cruise control? Accident avoidance, lane correction, self-driving features? Can you put a price on the safety of your spouse or children? I know I can't.
What evidence do you have that these features actually make cars safer? I'm not trying to be a dick here, but am seriously curious. My wife purchased a newer model Toyota Corolla with lane correction that makes driving in the winter significantly more dangerous (we ended up turning it off).
Reliability: it's just reality that as a car ages it becomes less reliable than it was previously. Wear and tear is a real thing. With reliability again comes safety as breaking down on the highway is not the most safe experience to be had.
I agree that cars age and become less reliable. Where I think we have a differing opinion is the age at which this becomes a problem. Most 4 - 8 year old cars from reputable manufacturers (Toyota, Honda) are very reliable. As a matter of fact, reliability of models of cars is better known when they're a few years old as time has allowed for more collection of data. Only driving a < 4 year old car is not necessary to ensure reliability.
Service: that's a bit more nebulous but they come to my office and pick up my car, service and wash it, then park it in my spot and give the keys to my secretary; similar for my wife's vehicle. All of this is done with no additional charge. If either of our vehicles needed to be in the shop more than the day a complimentary service loaner, of a new and comparable vehicle, is given to us with no charge. The SA we've had for the last 12 years or so delivers our new vehicles to the house if we want. He knows I know how to work leases and our deals are very transparent, and these days, done via text. No stress and I know the exact residual, MF, and cap cost going in.
Why aren't you able to wash your own car?
You mentioned that you were never using a car older than 4 years because you wanted the utmost reliability. Why do you need your vehicle to be in the shop so often? (As a side note, when I bring my 12 year old Corolla in to get it serviced they'll give me a ride to and from work to pick up my car as part of the service.)
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With car sharing you are more likely to wear out the drive train then the car getting outdated.
It's not "outdated" so much as "the interior is falling apart." Have you driven many higher milage cars, or (in a moment of misguided charity) let people borrow them for extended periods of time?
You run into things like the power windows (luxury!) not working right, or the manual windows sticking because the guide track is worn, the seats being beat up/ripped from use, general stains, the steering box being sloppy, etc. It's not (usually) drivetrain issues - even on really high mileage cars. There's certainly a survivor bias there, and you won't find many high mile Taruses of the "has a weak transmission" era, but the whole car wears out, and putting a million mile drivetrain in a car doesn't magically change that, by 300k miles, it's pretty beat up. Ride "sharing" services will be even worse, because you'll have people who truly don't care about the car, because it's someone else's car. I don't think we really see this with Uber/Lyft right now because the car owner is in there keeping it neat, but if it's self driving? Some percentage of people will be really rough on the car, and that's going to be a problem.
Can you put a price on the safety of your spouse or children? I know I can't.
I can and do. We don't drive a German luxury car, even though, if I were to abandon all long term financial goals, I could "afford" one on a cash flow basis. We drive something less expensive, optimized for our driving needs (currently a 2012 Chevy Volt, because my wife and kids do quite a few 20-30 mile days, which they can do mostly on electric). It's reasonably safe, but it's not the "safest" car on the road, nor does it have a lot of advanced features. They're of fairly limited use out in the rural area we live in, and aren't, to us, worth the money it would cost to get them.
Reliability: it's just reality that as a car ages it becomes less reliable than it was previously. Wear and tear is a real thing. With reliability again comes safety as breaking down on the highway is not the most safe experience to be had.
I've driven some genuine shitboxes in my years of driving. In order from least expensive, I've purchased cars for $100, $150, $200, and $350. Then, you know, a genuinely luxurious $2000 car!
In many, many years of doing that, I've been stuck on the side of the highway twice. Only one needed a tow - I was able to fix the other one (a freak failure of a nearly-new distributor cap) because I kept the old parts around. It's simply not that common, and I assume your definition of an "older car" is still quite a bit newer than either "I saved it from the scrapyard" or "I literally bought it from the junkyard."
Service: that's a bit more nebulous but they come to my office and pick up my car, service and wash it, then park it in my spot and give the keys to my secretary; similar for my wife's vehicle. All of this is done with no additional charge. If either of our vehicles needed to be in the shop more than the day a complimentary service loaner, of a new and comparable vehicle, is given to us with no charge. The SA we've had for the last 12 years or so delivers our new vehicles to the house if we want. He knows I know how to work leases and our deals are very transparent, and these days, done via text. No stress and I know the exact residual, MF, and cap cost going in.
Hey, I've got on-site service of all my vehicles too! I service them myself, on our property! :p Saves me an awful lot of hassle, and I bought a house instead of a car that comes with complementary service (a fully loaded Tesla is slightly less than we paid for our whole house).
If you've been suckered into believing that a fully loaded luxury car is a requirement for... whatever reasons, sure. Leasing them is a decent way to efficiently spend obscene amounts of money on a car. But you're still spending obscene amounts of money on a car that, fundamentally, accomplishes the same things my $100 beaters did: Get me around.
I know vehicles with the latest safety features, unsurprisingly, are the safest vehicles.
How much of that is correlated to the age of drivers? In general, "the latest safety features" tend to show up on luxury cars, which tend to be driven by people who can afford them. That generally means older owners (40s-60s), with decades of driving experience to rely on. They're generally safer drivers, regardless of the features in the car.
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Again, math. Well, more data. I don't make decisions based on anecdotes but rather on aggregated data when I can. I know vehicles with the latest safety features, unsurprisingly, are the safest vehicles.
OK, data it is.
The state in the US with the highest fatality rate per 100 million miles driven is South Carolina at 1.88. Source (https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview) The average US male puts 16,550 miles per year on their car. Source (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm) So, if you live in South Carolina and drive an average amount of miles yearly, your chance of automotive fatality is 0.031%.
According to NHTSA data (source (https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811825)) the percentage of occupants killed is indeed inversely correlated with the age of the vehicle. 26% for a brand new car, up to 30% for a five year old car, and up to 35% for an eleven year old car. This data is from 2005-2011 so current data would probably be slightly lower across the board.
So, if a brand new car vs an eleven year old car makes you 9% less likely to die in a car crash *once you've already crashed*. That would be reducing a 0.031% annual chance of automotive fatality by 0.003% to 0.028%.
I would argue that there are plenty of more cost-effective ways than driving a 2018 car instead of a 2007 to reduce one's annual chance of death by 0.003%.
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So again, back to the OP's question: I have zero concern driverless cars will ruin the value of my vehicle because I lease.
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Hey, I've got on-site service of all my vehicles too! I service them myself, on our property! :p Saves me an awful lot of hassle, and I bought a house instead of a car that comes with complementary service (a fully loaded Tesla is slightly less than we paid for our whole house).
I bought a house. In fact, I paid for a house. A big clown house and I love living in it. I'm glad your house is paid for too and I applaud your efforts.
Doing my own service? So there's individual preferences and how much we value our leisure time. Due to my income giving up an hour of leisure time needs to come with a huge premium. Servicing my own vehicle doesn't match that premium. It matches yours, and that's cool, and I support your choice 100% in that. Why don't people support mine here? (That was rhetorical.)
This is a good study in group dynamics. I am willing to stipulate a whole bunch of agreement but my one area of differentiation has the "in group" quite upset with me...even though they have no idea my personal situation and the amount of FI I participate in.
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Doing my own service? So there's individual preferences and how much we value our leisure time. Due to my income giving up an hour of leisure time needs to come with a huge premium. Servicing my own vehicle doesn't match that premium. It matches yours, and that's cool, and I support your choice 100% in that. Why don't people support mine here? (That was rhetorical.)
I know it was rhetorical, but let me take a stab at it. Your choice would seem to go generally against the advice of the person who started this blog and forum. He advocated minimizing your reliance upon others to do tasks that can easily be learned and accomplished on your own, calling it 'badassity'. It's therefore not surprising that you'll find dissenting opinions here.
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Hey, I've got on-site service of all my vehicles too! I service them myself, on our property! :p Saves me an awful lot of hassle, and I bought a house instead of a car that comes with complementary service (a fully loaded Tesla is slightly less than we paid for our whole house).
I bought a house. In fact, I paid for a house. A big clown house and I love living in it. I'm glad your house is paid for too and I applaud your efforts.
Doing my own service? So there's individual preferences and how much we value our leisure time. Due to my income giving up an hour of leisure time needs to come with a huge premium. Servicing my own vehicle doesn't match that premium. It matches yours, and that's cool, and I support your choice 100% in that. Why don't people support mine here? (That was rhetorical.)
This is a good study in group dynamics. I am willing to stipulate a whole bunch of agreement but my one area of differentiation has the "in group" quite upset with me...even though they have no idea my personal situation and the amount of FI I participate in.
One?
A big clown house and I love living in it.
I could have FI'ed years ago
I don't want more than the first three or four years of that lifespan
You do you. I don't really care. That said, you espousing the "I'm rich so I do what I want" attitude is akin to me going to a vegan forum and saying how much I love cheese and it's ok because I have my own cow. There are many flavors of FI. Driving new luxury cars (my assumption is BMW due to heavy lease subsidization they offer, though of course I could be wrong), living in a big clown house, while still working and earnings tons of money to the point where you don't even bother to wash your own cars? That does not fit this forum, which is why you're getting this backlash.
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Doing my own service? So there's individual preferences and how much we value our leisure time. Due to my income giving up an hour of leisure time needs to come with a huge premium. Servicing my own vehicle doesn't match that premium. It matches yours, and that's cool, and I support your choice 100% in that. Why don't people support mine here? (That was rhetorical.)
Because you're on the Mr. Money Mustache forum, which is not Boggleheads or other "I make a million a year, how do I optimize airline miles so I can get free first class upgrades for my nanny when she travels overseas with us?" type forums.
"I live in a giant house I deserve, drive brand new luxury cars because only the best for me and mine, lease them, and don't like doing things myself because I value my leisure time so much!" is very much at odds with the whole MMM ethos and methods - I'm not actually sure why you're on this particular forum with that approach to life and finances. It's not really the right forum for it. Presumably talking about how I change my own oil on a forum devoted to people earning lots of money would get a similar response, but I don't go about doing that. Quite a few people on this forum have learned to work on their own vehicles and do maintenance themselves because it's both money savings and useful skill building.
This is a good study in group dynamics. I am willing to stipulate a whole bunch of agreement but my one area of differentiation has the "in group" quite upset with me...even though they have no idea my personal situation and the amount of FI I participate in.
"One area of differentiation"? You're at odds with the founder of this site in pretty much every area that's come up recently!
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I know it was rhetorical, but let me take a stab at it. Your choice would seem to go generally against the advice of the person who started this blog and forum. He advocated minimizing your reliance upon others to do tasks that can easily be learned and accomplished on your own, calling it 'badassity'. It's therefore not surprising that you'll find dissenting opinions here.
Steve, how many guitars, amps, and effect pedals do you own?
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...because I value my leisure time so much!" is very much at odds with the whole MMM ethos.
Really? I thought a major part of the ethos was enjoying leisure time? Did I get that wrong? Is RE not basically in the pursuit of leisure time? Why then would I use up part of my leisure time when putting that same amount into my working life would be far more economically beneficial?
Either a big part of the ethos is optimizing non-working time or it's not. Seems to me it is.
I live in a giant house...
That was said in reply to the part of the post that implied I had decided to lease a vehicle and therefore did not have a home, or at the very least, had not paid my home off. Again, I thought removal of personal debt was a big part of the ethos? Or are you telling me being leveraged to the hilt and FIRE'ing is where it's at?
I have not attacked anyone here personally but the personal attacks on me are numerous. Nice work.
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...because I value my leisure time so much!" is very much at odds with the whole MMM ethos.
Really? I thought a major part of the ethos was enjoying leisure time? Did I get that wrong? Is RE not basically in the pursuit of leisure time? Why then would I use up part of my leisure time when putting that same amount into my working life would be far more economically beneficial?
Either a big part of the ethos is optimizing non-working time or it's not. Seems to me it is.
A big part of the ethos is making all of your time non-working* time through taming the wild horse of consumption and lifestyle inflation.
*referring to ordinary paycheck jobs, and instead focusing your time and energy on hobbies, passions, etc. that may or may not be revenue-generating
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I have not attacked anyone here personally but the personal attacks on me are numerous. Nice work.
If you would please point out where I have attacked you, I would greatly appreciate it.
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I have not attacked anyone here personally but the personal attacks on me are numerous. Nice work.
If you would please point out where I have attacked you, I would greatly appreciate it.
Please point out to me where I accused you in particular of that. However, if you read back where I made a simple reply to the OP's question, you'll see multiple less than flattering characterizations used against me.
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A big part of the ethos is making all of your time non-working* time through taming the wild horse of consumption and lifestyle inflation.
*referring to ordinary paycheck jobs, and instead focusing your time and energy on hobbies, passions, etc. that may or may not be revenue-generating
And from what I've posted you've determined I do not engage in the bolded?
As apparently some sort of personal justification/explanation is all that will do here, I tamed that wild horse earlier in my life. I busted arse at work, same as my wife did. The results were that we could be both FI and enjoy a few luxuries in life...just like I bet everyone else here does to one degree or another.
There was recently a thread here where folks were talking about annual spends of 200k and more. They received less grief than I have over leasing vehicles!
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A big part of the ethos is making all of your time non-working* time through taming the wild horse of consumption and lifestyle inflation.
*referring to ordinary paycheck jobs, and instead focusing your time and energy on hobbies, passions, etc. that may or may not be revenue-generating
And from what I've posted you've determined I do not engage in the bolded?
As apparently some sort of personal justification/explanation is all that will do here, I tamed that wild horse earlier in my life. I busted arse at work, same as my wife did. The results were that we could be both FI and enjoy a few luxuries in life...just like I bet everyone else here does to one degree or another.
There was recently a thread here where folks were talking about annual spends of 200k and more. They received less grief than I have over leasing vehicles!
From what I've posted, I've determined you would have more time available if you were actually FIREd.
Again, I really don't give two shits about what you do. I am explaining why you are getting this reaction, since you seem confused about it.
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I know it was rhetorical, but let me take a stab at it. Your choice would seem to go generally against the advice of the person who started this blog and forum. He advocated minimizing your reliance upon others to do tasks that can easily be learned and accomplished on your own, calling it 'badassity'. It's therefore not surprising that you'll find dissenting opinions here.
Steve, how many guitars, amps, and effect pedals do you own?
Two electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, a tenor acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, a mandolin, and a violin. Five of the previous were inherited, and the rest were purchased used. I have a bass amp and a guitar amp (both purchased used and non-functioning, but was able to get them working again). Couldn't give you an exact number of effect pedals (maybe eight?), I built and sold them for a while and still probably have a few half finished and kicking around in drawers. Aside from strings and tubes, my newest piece of musical equipment is about 15 years old.
Why?
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Really? I thought a major part of the ethos was enjoying leisure time? Did I get that wrong? Is RE not basically in the pursuit of leisure time? Why then would I use up part of my leisure time when putting that same amount into my working life would be far more economically beneficial?
"Leisure time" is an odd phrase to use. MMM is significantly about optimizing your life for happiness, and reducing consumption/money requirements through "badassity." Things like biking instead of driving, doing your own yardwork instead of paying someone (bonus for doing it with muscles instead of machines), etc. And, in the process, learning to enjoy that physical effort and work. I do things by hand that I could use a machine for, and (personally), I enjoy using older machinery instead of buying something new. I would love a new tractor, but... I don't need a new tractor, and part of the joys of an older (~75 year old) tractor, for me, are figuring out how to use it to accomplish what I need done. I maintain it myself, I keep a well engineered bit of classic machinery running, I avoid spending the money on a new tractor, etc.
At this point, I'm quite curious as to if you've actually read many of the front page blog posts.
That was said in reply to the part of the post that implied I had decided to lease a vehicle and therefore did not have a home, or at the very least, had not paid my home off. Again, I thought removal of personal debt was a big part of the ethos? Or are you telling me being leveraged to the hilt and FIRE'ing is where it's at?
Huh? At no point did I imply you didn't have a home/hadn't paid it off. I simply pointed out that luxury cars are comically expensive, especially to lease, compared to home ownership in a lower cost area. What we paid for our house is less than an awful lot of people spend on cars.
I have not attacked anyone here personally but the personal attacks on me are numerous. Nice work.
What are you defining as a "personal attack"?
A personal attack, at least by my terms, would be something like, "You're stupid for spending money on luxury cars." Pointing out that leasing luxury cars is insanely expensive and that your justifications for it are weak, at best? That's not a personal attack - that's debating a point of discussion.
Again, your recent series of posts is quite counter to what this forum is generally about.
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However, if you read back where I made a simple reply to the OP's question, you'll see multiple less than flattering characterizations used against me.
No one attacked you, stop pretending to be a victim. We pointed out your financial mistakes. That should be expected on these forums.
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"Leisure time" is an odd phrase to use. MMM is significantly about optimizing your life for happiness, and reducing consumption/money requirements through "badassity." Things like biking instead of driving, doing your own yardwork instead of paying someone (bonus for doing it with muscles instead of machines), etc. And, in the process, learning to enjoy that physical effort and work. I do things by hand that I could use a machine for, and (personally), I enjoy using older machinery instead of buying something new. I would love a new tractor, but... I don't need a new tractor, and part of the joys of an older (~75 year old) tractor, for me, are figuring out how to use it to accomplish what I need done. I maintain it myself, I keep a well engineered bit of classic machinery running, I avoid spending the money on a new tractor, etc.
And in a recent thread on cooking I said how I do things like cure my own charcuterie, make my own sausages, etc. Just because I don't want to wrench my car doesn't mean I don't engage in doing things by hand. For muscle work, like MMM, I pump iron. For cardio, I cycle. Just because my preferences are not exactly yours does not mean I don't engage in activities.
What are you defining as a "personal attack"?
A personal attack, at least by my terms, would be something like, "You're stupid for spending money on luxury cars." Pointing out that leasing luxury cars is insanely expensive and that your justifications for it are weak, at best? That's not a personal attack - that's debating a point of discussion.
Words ranging from "idiot" to "sucker" have been used concerning me. In what world are those not personal attacks?
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Two electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, a tenor acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, a mandolin, and a violin. Five of the previous were inherited, and the rest were purchased used. I have a bass amp and a guitar amp (both purchased used and non-functioning, but was able to get them working again). Couldn't give you an exact number of effect pedals (maybe eight?), I built and sold them for a while and still probably have a few half finished and kicking around in drawers. Aside from strings and tubes, my newest piece of musical equipment is about 15 years old.
Why?
Seems to me like this is more than necessarily needed, no? So the "why" is pointing out probably every one of us does not 100% minimize our lives. I know many guitar players with "GAS" but I make do with Tele I bought used. When it comes to guitars, I'm a "badass."
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Words ranging from "idiot" to "sucker" have been used concerning me. In what world are those not personal attacks?
I directed "sucker" at anyone who pays a lot of money for the depreciation on a brand new vehicle. Including me, at points in my life before I really worked out the details. It was not in any way intended as a personal attack, simply stating that paying that first few years depreciation for a brand new vehicle is, far as I'm concerned, for suckers. Though at least I bought the car, didn't lease it. Renting a car for a few years at early depreciation rates... eyuch.
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Two electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, a tenor acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, a mandolin, and a violin. Five of the previous were inherited, and the rest were purchased used. I have a bass amp and a guitar amp (both purchased used and non-functioning, but was able to get them working again). Couldn't give you an exact number of effect pedals (maybe eight?), I built and sold them for a while and still probably have a few half finished and kicking around in drawers. Aside from strings and tubes, my newest piece of musical equipment is about 15 years old.
Why?
Seems to me like this is more than necessarily needed, no? So the "why" is pointing out probably every one of us does not 100% minimize our lives. I know many guitar players with "GAS" but I make do with Tele I bought used. When it comes to guitars, I'm a "badass."
Precisely zero people here are saying to 100% minimize our lives.
There are levels between living in a $100 van and, say, owning a self-proclaimed clown house and leasing a new luxury car every three years. You're flirting with the black or white fallacy (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white) here.
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Two electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, a tenor acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, a mandolin, and a violin. Five of the previous were inherited, and the rest were purchased used. I have a bass amp and a guitar amp (both purchased used and non-functioning, but was able to get them working again). Couldn't give you an exact number of effect pedals (maybe eight?), I built and sold them for a while and still probably have a few half finished and kicking around in drawers. Aside from strings and tubes, my newest piece of musical equipment is about 15 years old.
Why?
Seems to me like this is more than necessarily needed, no? So the "why" is pointing out probably every one of us does not 100% minimize our lives. I know many guitar players with "GAS" but I make do with Tele I bought used. When it comes to guitars, I'm a "badass."
Nobody said that you should 100% minimize your life though. Nobody told you to get rid of your car, there were several suggestions for other ways to approach car usage so that you can still have a nice car to drive around in . . . but for less money. If you'll notice, most of the instruments that I have the pleasure of playing cost me zero dollars. I maintain all of them on my own, and they have provided me with years of fun . . . fun that I don't think would have been improved by having shiny new stuff that I don't know how to fix on my own.
You chose to buy a used Telecaster rather than rent an instrument and trade it in every few weeks. Why? Old instruments occasionally need work. They wear out (I'm on the second or third re-fret of several of my instruments now, pots will get scratchy and need replacing, truss rods need adjustment, bridges can be waped, nuts can wear down, and even the capacitors in your tone circuit will die eventually) and require maintenance (do you change your own strings and do your own setup, or pay someone to do it for you?). All of this could be avoided by renting a new instrument every few weeks like the poster mentioned doing with his car.
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You chose to buy a used Telecaster rather than rent an instrument and trade it in every few weeks. Why? Old instruments occasionally need work. They wear out (I'm on the second or third re-fret of several of my instruments now, pots will get scratchy and need replacing, truss rods need adjustment, bridges can be waped, nuts can wear down, and even the capacitors in your tone circuit will die eventually) and require maintenance (do you change your own strings and do your own setup, or pay someone to do it for you?). All of this could be avoided by renting a new instrument every few weeks like the poster mentioned doing with his car.
Old vehicles are dated and become rattle traps. As guitars age they get "mojo" and a free "relic" job.
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Old vehicles are dated and become rattle traps.
Sure, by the 200k mile and 15-20 year point, that's... starting to be a fair enough description of a poorly maintained one.
The difference between a new, zero-mile car and a 4-year, 50k mile car? Minimal. Except, after 4 years, it's 60-70% the price of the brand new one, or maybe less depending on the vehicle.
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You chose to buy a used Telecaster rather than rent an instrument and trade it in every few weeks. Why? Old instruments occasionally need work. They wear out (I'm on the second or third re-fret of several of my instruments now, pots will get scratchy and need replacing, truss rods need adjustment, bridges can be waped, nuts can wear down, and even the capacitors in your tone circuit will die eventually) and require maintenance (do you change your own strings and do your own setup, or pay someone to do it for you?). All of this could be avoided by renting a new instrument every few weeks like the poster mentioned doing with his car.
Old vehicles are dated and become rattle traps. As guitars age they get "mojo" and a free "relic" job.
The difference between the two is really just how you perceive them. Fortunately, that's 100% under your personal control! You can choose to be proud to drive your "mojo" filled "relic" car!
Two electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, a tenor acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, a mandolin, and a violin. Five of the previous were inherited, and the rest were purchased used. I have a bass amp and a guitar amp (both purchased used and non-functioning, but was able to get them working again). Couldn't give you an exact number of effect pedals (maybe eight?), I built and sold them for a while and still probably have a few half finished and kicking around in drawers. Aside from strings and tubes, my newest piece of musical equipment is about 15 years old.
Why?
Seems to me like this is more than necessarily needed, no? So the "why" is pointing out probably every one of us does not 100% minimize our lives. I know many guitar players with "GAS" but I make do with Tele I bought used. When it comes to guitars, I'm a "badass."
Nobody said that you should 100% minimize your life though. Nobody told you to get rid of your car, there were several suggestions for other ways to approach car usage so that you can still have a nice car to drive around in . . . but for less money. If you'll notice, most of the instruments that I have the pleasure of playing cost me zero dollars. I maintain all of them on my own, and they have provided me with years of fun . . . fun that I don't think would have been improved by having shiny new stuff that I don't know how to fix on my own.
You chose to buy a used Telecaster rather than rent an instrument and trade it in every few weeks. Why? Old instruments occasionally need work. They wear out (I'm on the second or third re-fret of several of my instruments now, pots will get scratchy and need replacing, truss rods need adjustment, bridges can be waped, nuts can wear down, and even the capacitors in your tone circuit will die eventually) and require maintenance (do you change your own strings and do your own setup, or pay someone to do it for you?). All of this could be avoided by renting a new instrument every few weeks like the poster mentioned doing with his car.
I also forgot to add . . . legitimately, you can make the case that you're more guitar "badass" than me if you want. I would never say that own as many instruments as I have is the ideal (or even a good) choice for most people.
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You can choose to be proud to drive your "mojo" filled "relic" car!
It's actually a neat little optimum for certain jobs. There exist jobs and positions where having a "nice car" is pretty well expected, and showing up in a Fit or something would be a somewhat career-limiting move. I think that's quite silly, but I'm also aware that such situations exist.
Instead of having a brand new (comically expensive) car, you can go for quirky and drive an older BMW/Mercedes/Porsche/etc. There's a window you want to avoid (in the 5-15 year old range is "not modern and why are you driving such an old car?"), but if you go back car enough (20-25 years is typically enough), and the car is mechanically well maintained and visually in good shape (no fenders rusting out, decent paint, keep it waxed), most people are perfectly fine with that. It's old enough that it's obvious you're driving it because you like that generation of car, and it's still a clean luxury car. Just not a modern one.
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I once leased a car under my business (honda civic). It made some sense as a tax write off.
Still a horrible decision. Constantly having to worry about any little scratches/dings which you get reamed for when you return the vehicle. They find a way to make you pay extra when you return the car. Even with the tax deduction, I would have been much better off just buying used. The deduction reduced my cost by ~ 35%. Couldn't imagine paying full price.
There is a lot to be said for owning a car where you don't have to stress about these things. Having a car where any scratch is just a battle scar, adds to the character.
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Not quite.
She was the safety-driver. Not a passenger.
It was her job to be alert and intervene.
That doesn't change my point: if a "driverless" car needs a driver, then it's not a driverless car. It's like paying for an "automatic" where you still have to use the clutch. Why would you bother? So I think driverless cars will certainly exist and be around, but they're not going to displace all the ordinary cars.
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That doesn't change my point: if a "driverless" car needs a driver, then it's not a driverless car. It's like paying for an "automatic" where you still have to use the clutch. Why would you bother? So I think driverless cars will certainly exist and be around, but they're not going to displace all the ordinary cars.
They won't need drivers eventually. They are still in the beta testing phase, hence having a driver as a backup.
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I await them, then, along with the flying cars, fusion power and the paperless office.
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I await them, then, along with the flying cars, fusion power and the paperless office.
and these small things called smartphones that have more computing power than the Orion spaceship? And can be put in our pockets?
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Why do you get 3 year leases instead of 1 year?
Math. The automakers create a sweet spot for leases in the 36-39 month area through, as stated above, subsidized residuals and interest.
That sounds an awful lot like you just put a price on the safety of your wife and kids.
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and these small things called smartphones that have more computing power than the Orion spaceship? And can be put in our pockets?
That are now mostly used to deliver addictive content that makes Vegas jealous? Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's amazing, and just because we really want something doesn't mean it's possible.
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That are now mostly used to deliver addictive content that makes Vegas jealous? Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's amazing, and just because we really want something doesn't mean it's possible.
Well sure. But what we're talking about is already very far along, and amazingly already beyond the early beta testing phases. Certainly autonomous driving shouldn't be held in the same realm as the notion of flying cars. It seems inevitable at this point, and just a matter of how many years away. I think it's all pretty amazing, maybe I'm easily impressed. I'm still amazed that I can sit down in a steel tube and travel several hundred miles an hour through the air across the world.
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But what we're talking about is already very far along, and amazingly already beyond the early beta testing phases. Certainly autonomous driving shouldn't be held in the same realm as the notion of flying cars. It seems inevitable at this point, and just a matter of how many years away.
Silicon Valley companies are amazing at assuming that "more or less competent" in the synthetic software world of the internet means they're competent in the real world as well. They're reliably wrong about that. Waymo is taking one of the more conservative approaches, and I expect will be successful, mostly, in the areas they've mapped. With a server rack in the back of each car.
General purpose self driving that doesn't require centimeter-accurate lidar maps of the region? Not worried about it happening any time soon outside the interstates in good weather.
I'm still amazed that I can sit down in a steel tube and travel several hundred miles an hour through the air across the world.
Aviation is way easier than self driving cars. And, also, insanely conservative, because when people get too creative with designs, other people die in large numbers.
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and these small things called smartphones that have more computing power than the Orion spaceship? And can be put in our pockets?
The Orion spacecraft has yet to fly, despite being in development longer than the entire duration of the Apollo programme. So that's perhaps not the most flattering comparison; smartphones are at least out there and working (more or less).
I'm not sure what the reference to the smartphone means. Are you saying that because technology X was successful developed, technology Y will be successfully developed? You are confusing advertising with engineering. Engineering is difficult. That's ceramic superconductors have in 30 years not really got any commercial applications: amazing science, but the engineering is hard, what with ceramic not being ductile and all.
The genuinely driverless car is promised soon. So are many things. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, we have to keep driving our own cars. And of course if we follow MMM's advice, driving them much, much less. That seems to be the least popular part of MMM's advice. People do love their clown cars.
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Silicon Valley companies are amazing at assuming that "more or less competent" in the synthetic software world of the internet means they're competent in the real world as well. They're reliably wrong about that.
Yes, you've made this point several times in this thread. I think we have to wait to see. I'm optimistic.
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The Orion spacecraft has yet to fly, despite being in development longer than the entire duration of the Apollo programme. So that's perhaps not the most flattering comparison; smartphones are at least out there and working (more or less).
https://www.zmescience.com/research/technology/smartphone-power-compared-to-apollo-432/
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Yes I know. Again: what's your point?
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Yes I know. Again: what's your point?
My main point is that it's pretty silly to compare a technology that is already being tested in the real world at scale to flying cars. I get that you're cynical, but the technology is obviously very far along already.
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The Orion spacecraft has yet to fly, despite being in development longer than the entire duration of the Apollo programme. So that's perhaps not the most flattering comparison; smartphones are at least out there and working (more or less).
https://www.zmescience.com/research/technology/smartphone-power-compared-to-apollo-432/
Warning..off topic: As both a mainframe computer buff and Apollo enthusiast, that "article" makes my head hurt. It's so blatantly incorrect on so many levels I don't even know where to start. Utter bollocks.
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https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-single-biggest-technical-problem-remaining-unsolved-in-autonomous-driving
Again, I think "ideal conditions" driving is very far along. But that last 20% is going to be so much more difficult. And it has to be solved before this becomes mainstream technology.
Remember the OP:
I'd be very worried that my new car would become obsolete in a few years.
I'm confident that is not a risk. Human-driven cars will not become obsolete for decades.
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To be honest, I'd be more worried about an autonomous car being obsoleted by newer autonomous cars. Will the rapid pace of development mean that three-year-old autonomous tech will be considered "as bad as nothing at all"? And that any price premium demanded by such tech will evaporate? I.e. "the autonomous tech in that used car is old enough that you might as well get a car without any"?
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I just can't get worried about my car's value at all. Mine have such low value that it's just not a concern. If I end up writing it off in a wreck tomorrow I don't really care. I have no interest in selling them ever. By the time I get done they will be scrap.
If you are worried about the value, that's a strong sign that you own too much car. Cars are (typically with very rare exceptions) not good investments for normal people...
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Yes I know. Again: what's your point?
My main point is that it's pretty silly to compare a technology that is already being tested in the real world at scale to flying cars. I get that you're cynical, but the technology is obviously very far along already.
ahem.
https://terrafugia.com/ (https://terrafugia.com/)
Haven't seen a self-driving car for sale anywhere.
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Saw this interview with Lex Fridman, an MIT robotics / AI lecturer who teaches on self driving cars. They are insanely far from being ready. Absolutely cannot function in real life. Can barely drive using sat nav and stay within the lanes. Even if you buy your car brand new, given newer cars aren't really built to last with all the electronics you'll have scrapped it by the time driverless cars are ready to be used and economically viable.
You have to distinguish between futurologists, and people who actually know the state of the applied research today, and only listen to the latter to make consumption choices.
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Not me. Our cars are basically worthless already.
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Saw this interview with Lex Fridman, an MIT robotics / AI lecturer who teaches on self driving cars. They are insanely far from being ready. Absolutely cannot function in real life. Can barely drive using sat nav and stay within the lanes. Even if you buy your car brand new, given newer cars aren't really built to last with all the electronics you'll have scrapped it by the time driverless cars are ready to be used and economically viable.
You have to distinguish between futurologists, and people who actually know the state of the applied research today, and only listen to the latter to make consumption choices.
do you have a URL for the Fridman interview?
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Saw this interview with Lex Fridman, an MIT robotics / AI lecturer who teaches on self driving cars. They are insanely far from being ready. Absolutely cannot function in real life. Can barely drive using sat nav and stay within the lanes. Even if you buy your car brand new, given newer cars aren't really built to last with all the electronics you'll have scrapped it by the time driverless cars are ready to be used and economically viable.
You have to distinguish between futurologists, and people who actually know the state of the applied research today, and only listen to the latter to make consumption choices.
do you have a URL for the Fridman interview?
it's the joe rogan podcast - available via multiple avenues. there's a website for it then you have your apple apps and all that... not for everyone but occasionally you get interesting guests
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The value of our diesel car has already devalued because everyone now wants to drive an electrical or hybrid car In Norway. Diesels are now very unpopular.
We bought our car 10 years ago when it was financially attractive to buy diesel.
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Saw this interview with Lex Fridman, an MIT robotics / AI lecturer who teaches on self driving cars. They are insanely far from being ready. Absolutely cannot function in real life. Can barely drive using sat nav and stay within the lanes. Even if you buy your car brand new, given newer cars aren't really built to last with all the electronics you'll have scrapped it by the time driverless cars are ready to be used and economically viable.
You have to distinguish between futurologists, and people who actually know the state of the applied research today, and only listen to the latter to make consumption choices.
do you have a URL for the Fridman interview?
it's the joe rogan podcast - available via multiple avenues. there's a website for it then you have your apple apps and all that... not for everyone but occasionally you get interesting guests
yeah, Joe Rogan gets all kinds of interesting types on his podcast.
I've been looking for something to do tomorrow at the dentist, so I'll listen to it then.
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Again, math. Well, more data. I don't make decisions based on anecdotes but rather on aggregated data when I can. I know vehicles with the latest safety features, unsurprisingly, are the safest vehicles.
OK, data it is.
The state in the US with the highest fatality rate per 100 million miles driven is South Carolina at 1.88. Source (https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview) The average US male puts 16,550 miles per year on their car. Source (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm) So, if you live in South Carolina and drive an average amount of miles yearly, your chance of automotive fatality is 0.031%.
According to NHTSA data (source (https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811825)) the percentage of occupants killed is indeed inversely correlated with the age of the vehicle. 26% for a brand new car, up to 30% for a five year old car, and up to 35% for an eleven year old car. This data is from 2005-2011 so current data would probably be slightly lower across the board.
So, if a brand new car vs an eleven year old car makes you 9% less likely to die in a car crash *once you've already crashed*. That would be reducing a 0.031% annual chance of automotive fatality by 0.003% to 0.028%.
I would argue that there are plenty of more cost-effective ways than driving a 2018 car instead of a 2007 to reduce one's annual chance of death by 0.003%.
Or - - adapt your life to drive less in the first place. That's what we did. Small town. Shorter trips, slower traffic, fewer miles, LCOL - suddenly the safety stats on our used cars exceed those of a new car and we've saved money all around. Still making a good living here.
Do I worry about my new car's value being ruined? No. I won't buy a new car any time soon. I'll buy just off-lease cars if I want something nice and shiny.
Also, I think tech progress on self-driving cars has advanced really fast. I think however that the details to get it right in every situation will take a long time. The "easy" problems have been solved. There will be thousands of articles and TV segments about how advanced these cars are but that amounts to advertising for the benefit of spendy consumers (advertising) and investors. Just like battery advancements are slow and steady though some media outlets want to talk up the latest laboratory miracle. They are attracting clicks and investors for the laboratory.
I figure we MIGHT have cars advanced enough to self drive by the time I'm an old man and need one. I think we'll have steering wheels for another 50-75 years though - if we still have cars. Might be that the economy changes enough that we can't afford cars anymore or environmental limitations will make them too expensive.
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Or - - adapt your life to drive less in the first place. That's what we did. Small town. Shorter trips, slower traffic, fewer miles, LCOL - suddenly the safety stats on our used cars exceed those of a new car and we've saved money all around. Still making a good living here.
I realize this advice came from a good place so please don't take this as snark but simply as analysis. I think it would be extremely unlikely that the delta would be positive for us in this scenario if we even eschewed the used cars and rode bikes. I mean, fees/costs from the sale of current house and purchase of new house, relocation cost, and both of our careers are highly compensated. Add to that we live in a MCOL area.
Odds are pretty good we would come out hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red on such a scenario.