[samstave]

this and the below comments just show that cars are, in general, ridiculously overpriced.

Instead of "universal basic income" - we should have "free cars for every individual" -- Look at how THAT would affect autonomous driverless cars!!!

[dsr_]

The incentives there are wildly misplaced.

With UBI, you get money. You can spend it on whatever you need or want.

With "Universal Cars" you get a car. If you already had one, you probably need to sell one or the other. But now everyone has a car, so the resale value crashes to nearly scrap. If you keep it, you need to pay for insurance, maintenance, and actual usage, which may or may not be a net positive.

Let's suppose you don't already have a car. Why not? If you live in a city, you may not have a need for a car. Selling it won't help much. Parking may be impossible or too expensive. Perhaps you cannot drive a car. This car is going to be useless to you.

On the upside, it bolsters the car manufacturing industry. On the other hand, many mechanics will go out of business because it will be cheaper to get a different car than fix the one you have.

On the gripping hand, expect gigantic traffic jams, rising fuel prices, and soaring pollution levels.

[neilwilson]

"With UBI, you get money. You can spend it on whatever you need or want"

As long as you have a slave class doing the producing who are forced to take your money. Otherwise you just get inflation because you haven't added anything to the supply of production side.

[dsr_]

If your mental model is based on a single self-sufficient town plus outlying farms that does no trading and never improves their technology, I can see how you would come to that conclusion.

But that's not the world we live in.