Ride hailing services are only cheaper in a few dense urban areas where most trips are short and parking is very expensive. Everywhere else they're still an expensive luxury.
Yep. I pay an insane amount of money to Lyft for rides to home because I live away from city and we only have one car.
Could have gotten a second car but I hate driving in peak hour traffic so I take the bus. Lyft is definitely convenient after hours since my last bus is at 6pm. The convinience comes at a steep price though.
Really? For a family of 4 or 5? Does lift even have car seats for children? We still need a minivan, and we pay 300 a month + gas when our car isn't paid for (which it is). We generally use used cars that are a decade old to save money.
I've got a wife, kid and one on the way, and even just us 3, I think uber/lyft wouldn't work. Why do a lot of people on HN assume everyone is single(and always will be), or a family <= 2.. That's a huge fallacy of thinking.
I can't wait for self-driving tech, I'll probably buy it when it hits used car lots, though. I'm hoping by 2030 it'll be real. I don't think uber/lyft can sustain more than 4-5 more years on investors alone, without charging a LOT more for rides if they're going to continue using real drivers.
The real disruption will be when car companies instead of selling cars, simply sell memberships to a car sharing plan... pay $200/family member/month to Ford, get unlimited self-driving wherever anyone in the family is going. No need for insurance/etc... gas included.
> Why do a lot of people on HN assume everyone is single
That's an easy one.. for the same reason they assume everyone is a young, urban, technical professional living in a major tech hub.
I recall this being a source of criticism (though admittedly not recently) about the problems startups are solving being skewed toward the problems the above people (the same ones doing the solving) tend to have.
> (and always will be)
I'm not sure that's quite true, at least not in the sense that of individuals.
However, they may assume it of the population within a certain location, such as that urban tech hub in which they live, if the individuals who do form >=3 families move away to the suburbs, and are replaced by single individuals. This seems to happen in US cities.
> when car companies instead of selling cars, simply sell memberships to a car sharing plan
What's their incentive? Car-share already exists for non-self-driving cars, but through third parties. It's quite expensive.
> get unlimited self-driving
That seems a particularly unattractive option for the provide, as well as being political dynamite.
I know for one, Tesla has made it so you can't use tesla for rideshare, because you have to use their (forthcoming) service, IIRC, I remember reading that somewhere, I also believe some of the manufacturers of self-driving tech have partnered with lyft or uber to possibly be the software behind their own rideshare.
The future of cars, makes sense not to own... A car just dropped johnny (a kid I have no relation to) off at school a mile from my house 5 minutes before I need to be to work, this car then becomes mine till I get to work, from there it takes someone else to a brunch meeting... and so forth.
Using logistics it can free up roads by sending the closest available car to pick people up, and possibly re-arranging traffic patterns via networking to make roads clearer...etc.
Edit: one more attractive thing for car companies: Subscriptions. Someone paying 800 for life, is MUCH better than someone paying 20k once. They can know with better certainty their monthly recurring revenue when charting growth/etc..
Seems more likely to be a membership in the 50 cents to $1 per mile range which is what it currently costs to operate a car (including for any deadheading). Not sure why anyone would offer for a fixed fee unless it was for a very high number.
I suspect the assumption is that this cost will go down if insurance/liability (i.e. injury and property damage) costs are drastically reduced by self-driving cars and fuel and maintenance costs are also reduced by all-electric drivetrains.
Still, $200 seems far-fetched in light of the average American 1200 miles monthly. At under $.17/mi (not counting deadheading), that might not even cover depreciation/capital cost.
It'd be 400 for a family of 2, 1000 for a family of 5. Could be 300, or 400 per person I just pulled an arbitrary # out of my arse. It does assume more electric use, maybe not 100% electric, but maybe 100 mpg with electric assist.
People are more apt to buy into an 'unlimited' plan. Road trips would cost extra (because you're gaining unlimited full-multi-day access to a vehicle), maybe something like $30/day + gas.
It depends on where you live and your lifestyle. They certainly wouldn't be for me. And there are many situations where I have to drive myself, even if it's a rental car.
I don't know if it's cheaper in urban USA than here in Western Australia... But I find taking Uber every morning and afternoon works out to be substantially (i.e. prohibitively) more expensive for me than driving the car in to the office.