I don’t necessarily want to come off as disagreeing with this post as I respect all your contributions here.
No problem
However, I have seen some of these arguments for RT written here before as if they are a fact but I am having a hard time wrapping my small brain around some of these. Where is everyone getting these “facts” for RT?
To be clear, it was a prediction based on facts. It could be wrong. Also a few big wildcards here are:
1) Boring Co tunnels
2) How much will robotaxis cause an increase in amount of transportation consumed?
3) What are the difficult-to-predict, second-order consequences of this huge societal transition?
I admit this is based on my bubble of the world but I don’t see myself or anyone I know giving up there car. Seems like way too much of an inconvenience.
Probably some will and some won’t. And many more will own a car but also use robotaxis some of the time rather than taking their own vehicle. Bear in mind that the demographics on this forum, and I think probably in the broader investment community, skew old and rich. In the US at least, Gen Z has shown the lowest interest in car ownership since the beginning of the mass-market automobile era and the percentage of young adults and teenagers getting driver’s licenses has been gradually declining. Might be true elsewhere but I haven’t looked. The affordability aspect is important for a lot of people who can barely afford their own current car-dependent lifestyle. Plus it’s not necessarily about picking the cheaper option, but also the opportunity to upgrade to something nicer than one could afford for a personal vehicle. If you can get Mercedes luxury at Kia prices, that will attract a lot of people. At every level of size and luxury, robotaxis will be more affordable thanks to the superior economic efficiency.
Speaking of age, when you go from old to elderly, driving becomes increasingly difficult and hazardous. Every developed wealthy nation in the world has a rapidly growing population of seniors. They will be less interested in personal car ownership if robotaxis present an open that’s easy, convenient and physically accessible (in a mobility and pain sense of the term).
Also, why would there be a large elimination of parking spaces? Assuming people give up car ownership (I don’t see that happening but), Commuting into my city for work would need a lot of RT. Wouldn’t they need to be parked somewhere near everyone’s home to be ready at any moment? Then won’t most of them need to be parked somewhere near all the commuters coming home? Also, how would it work when you have 1000s of people requesting RT all within the same hour to come home. Wouldn’t they need to be parked nearby for people to find them or at least be ready to pick someone up?
Today, the car follows the person. Almost every destination has much more parking than it actually needs most of the time. I’ve read somewhere that in the US it’s a regulatory rule or something like that. As a result, cities have significantly more parking spaces than vehicles. My guess for the US is about 2-10x more parking than vehicles, depending on the city. Most parking spaces are unoccupied at any given time. In a robotaxi city, the overflow parking rules could be relaxed and there could instead be fewer, larger lots for idle robotaxis.
Additionally, a bunch of the area of a parking lot isn’t actual parking spaces. About half of it is the travel lanes between rows of spaces, plus a bit more for the entrance/exit roadways that connect the lot to the surrounding streets. A parking lot for robotaxis doesn’t need all those lanes between rows. Current parking lots only need that because people want to be able to get
their particular car in and out. In contrast, robotaxi storage can be treated more like a “stack” or “queue” data structure, where only the cars on the end of a column can move while the bulk of the cars in the middle of each column are trapped. Since one vehicle is as good as any other, it doesn’t matter that most of the cars aren’t accessible. Just add or pull from the edges as needed. And if there are fewer, larger parking lots in a robotaxi world, then fewer entrance/exit roadways are necessary in aggregate across a city.
Also, robotaxis reduce the amount of parking area needed per vehicle. So the spaces could be smaller. Most robotaxis will probably be two-seaters with about half the footprint of the average vehicle today. Plus there won’t be side mirrors which reduces the width of every vehicle model relative to a human-driven equivalent. Also, when parking is done with the precision of a computer and when there are no occupants who need to open the doors for ingress and egress, less clearance would be needed between the sides of two adjacent vehicles. I’m not sure whether I’m missing something but in principle I could see the side clearance being only a couple inches.
Same with carpooling, why would it make it easier and how would that even work and why would anyone want to carpool anymore than they do now?
I doubt it will be a big difference in the rate of carpooling. However I have personally used Uber Pool many times to save money. Uber doesn’t offer that option anymore but the attraction was that the fares were lower. Some customers would be price sensitive.
Also carpooling via Uber Pool helped solve a coordination problem with a software platform. It helped effortlessly match people in real time who had similar origin and destination points.