Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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I agree with what you said about price fixing and competition. But why do you think multiple robotaxi companies will survive in the (long) future? We know that’s not what happened with Uber/Airbnb that killed their competitors with predatory pricing. How do you know this time it would be different?
Thanks for the detailed cost breakdown. You seem to have thought about this deeply. But I don’t see labour cost (e.g., engineers) in the breakdown. Why did you not include it?
I agree that the battery cost (and thus operating cost) would go down, but again I’m not convinced it would mean lower fare because that’s not what usually happens. I also agree these companies know how much money will be made on self-driving systems, which is exactly why I think they would aim for a monopoly, and the one surviving would charge passengers as high as it can.
In you and your wife’s case, is using a normal taxi 5-6 times not cheaper than the second vehicle cost?
Anyway, from what you wrote, it seems the biggest issue here is cost/fare. In that case, public transit, which we already have and benefits all people (including both the elderly and people with disabilities), would be a better solution than any taxi.
There are three ridesharing companies in the city I live near, plus regular taxis. Is there an example of a region that only has Uber that you can think of? Airbnb also has competition from VRBO and local hotels keeping nightly prices down.
The engineering to design the product is built into the cost of the vehicle, it gets amortized over a massive number of units over many years and therefore doesn't need to be included in back of the napkin calculations like this.
I'm pretty sure that the government in my country (Canada) would destroy a self-driving car monopoly before it could establish itself. The EU probably would too. They would likely mandate the company license it's tech to other manufactures at government set rates like they do currently with a few other industries like Cellphone networks. That being said, there are already more than a half-dozen big name companies working on it, I highly doubt only one will succeed.
I live in an area very poorly served by Taxis, since I'm about a half hour (on a highway) outside of the city. We only have 2 taxis (total vehicles, not companies) in the community that only operate during daytime hours and a ride into the city is about $50 one way. $300 doesn't go very far when a return trip is $100+ tip. The bus into town only runs twice in the morning and twice back out in the afternoon and if your destination isn't directly on the main route it can take 2+ hours to get to a specific location in the city.
Self-driving busses would be great too, they would increase access in many areas reducing the need for cars. They are the exact same tech though there's almost no difference between driving a car or a bus from a machine learning perspective. The decrease in costs would be less though, since busses are much more capital intensive compared to their labour cost. They may only save 30-40% of costs by eliminating the drivers. Busses also operate at much higher utilization rates already.