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by mmt 2896 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

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..