[spacKingChamath]

You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollars.

People enjoy the privacy, flexibility, convenience, and safety of having a vehicle space to themselves vs public transport. Even in economies which have heavily incentivized public transport (Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong), people still pay large costs to get access to the incentives I mentioned above. AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.

I get throwing conjecture out there makes it seem like you found a real problem, but you have no solution. Even if you increased public transit with more rail lines and busses, you can't solve the privacy, convenience and safety factor with something that is public. There a reason we have locks on our doors and don't share our homes, even though most of our home is empty and we can only occupy one room at a time.

We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.

[stfp]

> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.

But again what makes you think that AVs won't be personal cars with the same ownership model? GM is suddenly going to be cool with selling 1/10000th of the cars they sell today?

[spacKingChamath]

There is more money longer term in a complete AV system then in personal car ownership. You can see it in GM market capitalization today. They are worth ~30 billion while Cruise is estimated to also be worth 30 billion. Making money off each mile is way more lucrative then selling a vehicles most people don't update for 3-7 years at a time. And it will be better for the consumer because it means more miles per vehicles which = less total vehicles.

[KennyBlanken]

> You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollar

What the public wants is irrelevant; the public wants to eat its cake and have it as well, all the while riding a magical flying unicorn. Low occupancy vehicle use in urban areas is not sustainable, and never has been. There simply isn't enough road space. In the space of 2-3 cars which likely only contain 2-3 people, a bus can carry fifty or more people: https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/

...and you can't build your way out of the problem, because capacity does not increase anywhere near a linear rate as lanes are added: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/06/21/the-science-is-clear-...

The problem is so bad that SimCity creators had to massively fudge road capacity and parking, pretending that there are massive underground parking lots everywhere: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/x6ao05/simcitys_c...

Climate emissions goals aren't achievable without a significant curtailing in low occupancy vehicle use, as well. The most efficient production EV, a Model 3, gets about 4 miles per kWHr. An e-bike...even a cargo e-bike...will get around 60 miles per kWHr.

Further: we can't afford it. At least in the US, a huge amount of infrastructure hasn't received the maintenance funding it needs, and we vastly overbuilt our road network - paving to everyone's driveway and building more and more roads as traffic increased - without thinking whether the long-term expenses were sustainable. In the near future, bridges are going to start collapsing because nobody wanted to pay for the upkeep they needed and now we can't pay for it.

> We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.

Aside from the fact that our current road network is based on not just idealism but outright sticking one's head in the sand and not paying the maintenance costs...

There are "real solutions" working just fine in most of Europe and especially the Netherlands and Denmark.

> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.

The only thing AVs "improve" is eliminating labor costs and a potential increase in safety. They address none of the congestion and energy efficiency problems of low occupancy vehicle use, and by reducing the cost, the technology either increases profits or lowers the cost, both of which will lead to their greater use.

Safety isn't relevant in this discussion because people fear crime and rubbing elbows with smelly people who don't look like them. The reality is that public transit is orders of magnitude safer than low occupancy vehicle travel because collisions are far more common than crime, and public transit drivers are involved in collisions with pedestrians and cyclists far less than other drivers.