[bigiain]

I wonder what sort of population density and usage pattern you'd need before that worked in your favour?

If my apartment complex had a few dozen cars shared between a few hundred apartments, perhaps the car I take to go shopping could pick up the next door kid from soccer on the way back, then a different car might pick me up at the shops when I'm done, after dropping some other neighbour at the movies...

(I guess I'm now describing taxis. I wonder what the difference between this, and a taxi network of driverless cars is?)

[bigiain]

Responding to my own comment here...

Anybody got both Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk's numbers in their speed dial?

What if a "disrupt the cab industry" company got together with a "low moving part, high reliability electric car maker" to do an end-run around the expected auto industry opposition...

A fleet of driverless electric taxis, all routed by smartphone apps and behavioural prediction...

[bigiain]

Then, when everybody is impressed with how well they work, you start selling fleets of them to Apple/Google/Oracle/SouthBayTechFirmDeJour - every evening a train of autonomous cars starts arriving and emptying out your campus 4 people per car heading for nearby/on-the-way destinations, all of a sudden those 20 hectares of parking lot can become cube farms or data centres...

During the middle of the day and all night, you lease the capacity to FedEx or UPS...

[slyn]

As long as we're hitting this one out the ballpark we can imagine all the online services getting in on the action: like the OKCupid speed date commute, the Yelp surprise me whats for dinner restaurant ride, or the Groupon deal of the day carpool.

[mediaman]

Limited range cars with long recharge times would be a poor operating fit for economics that favor high utilization. There'd be too much downtime during peak times of day.

Maybe it could be coupled with swappable battery pack stations that the autotaxis could visit to get a freshly charged pack. A geographically focused taxi company could have the financial resources to invest in the battery depot, which would also solve the standardization problem.

[anifow]

Sorry, that's been solved. There are efforts to implementing this exact network of fuelling stations (battery swapping) for electric cars, and Better Place is a shining example from Isreal:

http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=10007...

[DennisP]

On the other hand, if you find yourself running low on juice, either because you're on a long trip or because you didn't plan ahead, it's not a problem. You just swap cars like the Pony Express swapped horses.

Lower utilization is balanced by lower energy costs than gasoline (but you're right, swappable batteries would help too).

[bigiain]

Perhaps a revenue opportunity for cash-strapped cities?

If we stop owning cars and the communal ones we use drive themselves home, we'll stop putting money in parking meters.

Replace the parking meters with charging stations...

[nathanhammond]

Bright Automotive is doing fleet vehicles, not a huge step away.

http://www.brightautomotive.com/

[ars]

And I assume you will install and deinstall the carseat each time? A huge portion of cars are used to transport kids, and it's not practical to remove the carseat each time.

You can't have a car with a loaner carseats either since they have to be individually adjusted to the kid.

Every single time people talk about cars, and public transportation they always forget about kids. I see it over and over. Come on people - expand your worldview a little.

[dolbz]

I would expect that eventually the safety of automated cars will far exceed current levels and therefore child car seats won't be required in the same way that no-one uses a car seat on a train (or even a bus actually, which is presumably much more dangerous than a train)

[svnv]

This just opens the market up to build a carseat that solves this problem. How about a regular seat that can be folded out or transformed into a seat suitable for children?

[icebraining]

Where I live, a certain percentage of taxis have big trunks, for people with baggage (they can request that when they call for it).

Why not have a percentage of driverless cars pre-equipped with carseats? You'd just have to configure once the age of your kids, then when you call a car (using e.g. a smartphone app), you just say for who it is ("Siri, I need a car for john, mary and me") and the right type will come.

[ars]

The car seat needs to be individually adjusted, especially for younger kids (different heights needs the straps in different slots, although the fine tuning can often be done on the spot).

And you're going to need every combination of ages, people have more than one child.

There are approximately 10 different car seat configurations for the various age ranges (5 actual car seats). And assuming up to 3 kids would require 1000 different cars.

There is rear facing (with 3 heights), front facing strapped (4 heights), front facing buckled, booster, and booster without back. (Although many car seats can handle 2 types in one seat. But it requires you to reinstall it.)

[cbr]

     5 actual car seats

Are current parents really buying 5 car seats as their kid grows up?

[ars]

They buy 3 since virtually all can convert between two levels (any two adjacent levels). A rare (and expensive and heavy) few can do 3 levels in one.

But converting the seat requires rethreading the straps and other adjustments - it can take an hour to install some types if you are not familiar with it.

[ebrenes]

I'm not sure how it applies to other countries, but here at least you have to have special car seats for all children until they're aged 12. It's insane, but that's the fabulous new law they enacted. So, yeah in some cases, some parents really are buying that many seats.

[DennisP]

So people with kids buy a car, and rent it out when they're not planning to use it for a few hours.

[XLcommerce]

this doesn't sound like a show stopper to me... simply an opportunity for someone to invent a one-size-fits-all car seat :)

[ars]

Considering that there are 5 different types of car seats, and they can be adjusted to about 10 different configurations that's not going to be an easy task.

[sethg]

The people who design car seats these days know that their customers would rather spend an hour rethreading/reinstalling their car seat every six months than spend over $200 on the seat. But if there were a large fleet of shared cars on the road, and if some entrepreneur came out with a $1000 car seat that could be readjusted in seconds for a child of any size, then the owners of the fleet would have an incentive to loan out those seats along with the cars.