[throwway120385]

They have a net positive effect for every owner, except that they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood in most places. So I'm not entirely sure they're a vast net positive in every value system. In yours, yes, but not in mine.

[mwigdahl]

Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.

[nradov]

There is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.

[mwigdahl]

And you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.

[nradov]

Consumers can already rent or lease automobiles. This is an operating expense, not a capital expense.

[Gigachad]

Rental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it.

Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.

[gosub100]

Yep just like how massively cheaper housing is to rent, right?

[Gigachad]

I use cars more like I use a hotel. Inconsistently on demand when PT doesn’t cover the route I need.

If I bought and sold a house every time I needed somewhere to stay on holiday, renting would be massively cheaper.

I’ve already done the math and uber occasionally is cheaper than owning a car. Self driving electric will be even cheaper.

[littlexsparkee]

how are you going to compare cars with no fixed location premium with housing? also utilization is totally different - cars sit ~95% of the time, housing can be nearly round the clock if you work at home. transportation is more like a utility/commodity whereas there are so many personal factors for where to live.

[next_xibalba]

Automobiles are one of a key pillar of logistics. Getting things (food, medicine, construction materials, etc. etc.) to and from backbones like rail, harbors, airports etc. So even for those who don't own a vehicle or even want to own a vehicle, automobiles are still a vast net positive.

I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe everyone lives in giant 10 million+ population cities that are all connected to each other by rail (and rail connects all airports, harbors, etc.) and then you have to show up at rail station to get your groceries or whatever else?

[californical]

Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.

Yes cars/trucks/busses are still useful overall and are an incredible last-mile solution for freight.

But on a personal level, it means we all must live far apart and maintain our own individual vehicles, along with the average total costs of $11,500/year PER CAR. [0]

I’m not saying they should’ve even been banned for personal use - owning a car and living in a rural suburb should still be an option, but it is very expensive to choose that lifestyle.

However the auto companies on the early to mid 1900s had heavy influence on policy, even buying and shutting down their public transit competitors, converting cities into “car cities”. This is where it drove into “negatives outweigh the positives” territory. Everything before that was more positive, but this was a massive negative on society and continues to handicap cities today, making them expensive and even just dangerous to walk around (due to high speed roads and limited sidewalks)

[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-ownin...

[lamasery]

The amount of space in US cities (broadly, out into their sprawl) that is used up by cars is incredible and serves to make other modes of transportation (to include things like busses, even) less-useful and make cars on-par with or worse than things like bicycles once you take out the time spent traveling these inflated distances, ~50% of which distance typically exists because of cars, and the time spent working to pay for your car, to say nothing of then needing to dedicate more time specifically to working out (or just accept being less healthy) because you're not walking or bicycling as much as you could be in a world where cars hadn't sprawled everything really far apart with gigantic parking lots, half-mile-diameter highway interchanges, large barely-used front lawns to provide distance from unpleasant and loud roads, big unusable "green space" buffers from highways, et c.

Once you start really marking how much nothing you're driving by even in many cities, where that "nothing" is one or another use of land that exists solely because of cars, it's a bit of a shock. "Wait, work would only be 8 miles away instead of 15 if not for the effects of widespread private car ownership? The grocery store could be 1 mile instead of 3? And I spend how much time a week bicycling to nowhere in particular to make up for sitting all day long? And this car & gas & insurance costs me how many of my work-hours per week, just to pay for it? Hm... am I... losing time to cars!?"

[next_xibalba]

You don't get highways and the interstate system if vehicles are not for personal use. And if you don't get those, you don't get the modern logistics system.

I guess what I don't understand is, given the current state, 1) what do you want? 2) how much will it cost? (and how will we pay for it?) and 3) what are the tradeoffs?

On a related note, it seems like a lot of the anti-car/urban planning wonks have a belief that everyone really wants to walk, ride bikes, or take mass transit everywhere, and I think they're wrong. Most people want to drive personal vehicles.

Maybe if we lived in a world where mass transit had very strictly enforced behavioral norms, more would consider it. But even then, I still think most people prefer the many conveniences afforded by personal vehicles.

[californical]

I guess instead of answering your first three questions, I’ll say this:

Our world would be better without being completely dependent on cars. You can see this in a few select cities or neighborhoods that have avoided the worst of car dependency. There are still suburbs, but they’re a bit more dense and you can easily bike to a grocery store in 10 minutes. There are still rural suburbs, but it’s much more expensive to live there due to the extra effort to get where you need to go.

There isn’t an easy way back since we let the auto industry have such a huge influence in politics, they’ve shaped the world, and it would take us decades and a LOT of money to revert the damage. We can still make steps.

HOWEVER, to bring the point back, we’re still in the 1910’s auto industry with AI. Are we going to let the AI industry get heavily involved in politics and shape our world into a worse one to benefit them? We’re at a point where we can reap the benefits, like with early cars, without the damage that came later

[Marha01]

> Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.

Yes, they are in fact, the same. You cannot introduce such massively useful technology into the world and then say that it would be used only for logistics and not for personal transportation. Short of a worldwide totalitarian government, such arbitrary restriction would be completely unenforceable.

It is possible to shape things with regulation, but only to some degree. With any great technology, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good outweights the bad in any historical technology. AI will be no exception.

[next_xibalba]

Exactly. These arguments are all buttressed by the "if everyone would just..." argument [1]. In fact, everyone will not just. And so if you want to build your Utopia, it will have to be compelled by force.

[1] https://x.com/eperea/status/1803815983154434435

[lamasery]

Sure, on your own land, just like you can drive more-or-less whatever you want as long as you stick to your own property, today, including vehicles that aren't "street legal".

On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just any purpose.

[Marha01]

How about the fact that any country that tries to ban private ownership of cars would completely fall behind in all car-related technologies, infrastructure and services, which would very soon negatively affect all those commercial or logistical use cases that our civilization vitally depends on?

Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look at it.

[pocksuppet]

Any country that tries to ban private ownership of nuclear weapons would fall completely behind in all nuclear-weapon-related technologies. Should we therefore encourage the private ownership of nuclear weapons?

[lamasery]

I entirely fail to see why this is a "fact".

[Earw0rm]

We pretty much did with aviation.

[Marha01]

Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.

[lamasery]

Yeah we red-queens-raced ourselves into a position where now we have to have private cars, because if we don't we're screwed. Turned cheap 25-minute bike commutes into expensive 25-minute car commutes that can't safely or practically be biked, and shoved everything so far apart on account of giant parking lots and big highways cuttings straight through cities that the nearest bus stop is a half-mile away and that 25-minute car commute would take ninety minutes by bus, so now we have to have cars.

There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.

[Earw0rm]

I'd argue that's /because/ we regulated aviation (and also some annoying physics limitations), so we never had the option of becoming fully dependent in the way lots of places have on cars.

Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.