You sell less to people living in the cities but maybe you sell more to the operators of fleets of rental cars, even self driving if that really becomes mainstream. Not enough to match the decrease of sales.
You keep selling to people living in countryside, where you don't go anywhere without a car and where fleets of cars would have to be very large to be able to cover the territory in a meaningful way. There will be less and less people living there but it could affect the kind of cars that are manufactured. By the way, a self driving car would be very useful to elderly people living in their house far away from the nearest town.
Little of what you said is based on fact, only grievance.
Very few cities in the us are actively anti car, and the ones that are, are dense enough that vehicle emissions are a local problem for them.
We’re not demanding evs for ourselves, we’re demanding gas cars stop gassing our homes. You want to drive a v8 dually? Great, go nuts! Keep it out of SF!
They're ripping up lanes of traffic in my city and replacing them with bike lanes that nobody uses.
The busy intersection next to my home used to take all of 15 seconds to turn at, now I get stuck for five to six minutes at a time because they now forbid right turns on red and stuck left turners in front of right turners.
Meanwhile, nobody is using the bike lanes.
The bike lanes are gender and age inequitable, favor low-commercial activity, and hamper productive economic activities. Not only that, but they're unusable in inclement and hot weather, which my city experiences frequently.
I drive a car because I'm buying things, traveling with family, and spending hundreds of dollars. People on bikes are not doing these things and are not contributing to the tax base as much as car drivers. A typical bike rider's coffee and book reading activities do not match a trip to Target and a local restaurant with family in terms of economic impact.
Now multiply that times every car rider who is being delayed and disrupted. All of this spending is now being delayed or even prevented.
We're going to feel really silly when we need more lanes for all the autonomous vehicles that will come online in the next 15 years. Autonomous vehicles - transportation, logistics, last mile delivery, ordering robotics services, etc. - are going to be a billion times more important than bikes.
Just go to a park or get a gym membership if you want to exercise. Or, better yet, take your bike with you on your car and drive to the countryside trails.
I think it takes time for demand to build. Certainly cities like London have seen huge growth in bike use. In my own home town(which is by no means flat) I'm seeing lots of cargo bikes, especially around tge school run.
To your point on bike owners not contributing to the economy. They probably have a similar income, and are paying similar taxes. They are still buying groceries. But where they choose to spend their money is different. It's all still economic activity though.
> People in cities demanded EVs, yet didn't show up to keep buying them.
That's only natural, because two kinds of people want EVs in cities (with some overlap). The first kind wants less noise, less pollution and fewer gas stations inside the city - they want other people to buy EVs, but don't want a car themselves. The second wants to own an EV because it's green and efficient.
Cars have become obscenely expensive and auto makers seem to be incorporating more and more planned obsolescence into their designs, so I've decided I'm just going to keep driving my aging car for as long as I can and maybe just get an e-bike for short trips to the market. It really feels like the auto industry is made up of dinosaurs who don't see the asteroid coming their way.
If your theory is true we might see an era where supply vastly exceeds demand and car manufacturers will need to offset brand new vehicles to keep cash flow going. Sounds great to me, sign me up for 20$k brand new Ford when the time’s ready.
> If your theory is true we might see an era where supply vastly exceeds demand and car manufacturers will need to offset brand new vehicles to keep cash flow going. Sounds great to me, sign me up for 20$k brand new Ford when the time’s ready.
The car manufacturers could have staved this off - they keep developing new models with little to no marginal improvement. Once we got seatbelts, airbags and similar in cars, there's literally no reason for a new model to drop, but here we are with new models dropping every 5 years, using parts that don't fit the old model!
Maybe if they were dropping only new types of cars (say, EVs), I could see a need, but there's no reason a 2010 Toyota has to be replaced by a 2024 - you have the jigs, the factory, the supply chain for parts already. Just keep making it and charge less.
There are plenty of 2010 Toyotas still out there, running great, if you want one. The market has instead demanded more different-looking cars (for variety), and generally larger vehicles with a higher riding position, not to mention newer creature comforts like air conditioned seats, and safety features like beeping at you when a car is in your blind spot and you try to change lanes.
The evidence that this is what the market demands is that Toyota is selling tons of new vehicles, despite the 2010 Toyotas still being available (used) for a lot less money.
> There are plenty of 2010 Toyotas still out there, running great, if you want one.
That's not my point. My point is that the billions poured into designing the three new generations of Toyota since 2010 did not have to be spent by Toyota.
But they did spend it, to design new cars, with little to no actual improvements, and so they have had to price their new cars appropriately, to recoup the cost.
What would a brand new Toyota cost today if billions of dollars were not spent in designing a whole new car, with all new incompatible parts, and all-new jigs? Would we still be looking at $40k for a brand new car?
It was going so well until it mentioned VTOL aircraft. It's been 100 years of this sci-fi dream man, people need to understand that nobody wants drones or "flying cars" above their head or property...
"Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft are on track to provide urban air transit within the next few years, targeting the high-margin commuters who traditionally buy premium vehicles."
Okay. So... flying cars? Don't think so. Robotaxis make sense where taxis make sense and you can get by without a car already. The demographic decline is real.
There's the simple physics of a vtol craft when landing needing to push down a lot of a air very fast just to lift an average human - plus the weight of the craft itself. There's a reason helicopters today don't land on street corners even if there's no rotor clearance issues. And these "personal" VTOLs don't seem any lighter than a helicopter of a similar size - for example the "Air One" is twice the mass of a Robinson R22 - ~400 vs ~970 kg empty.
The idea that they would be common enough to seriously disrupt "personal transport", even restricting to the "premium" market as it's known today is crazy. Imagine a fancy party where every 10 seconds everyone on the red carpet is being blown away by the backwash of someone landing - also disrupting everyone else trying to land there at the same time.
They are talking about unmanned drones that operate as flying taxis. They have them in China. We will never have flying cars after 9/11 showed how flying objects can damage property.
It's not 9/11 that will kill it but people not wanting 2 tons of metal flying overhead. The occasional helicopter is one thing. Having hundreds of these flying around, when one can clip a building from a gust of wind and go plummeting into bystanders is a no-go.
Not to mention the noise. Residential neighborhoods will ban these immediately (and some won't have a choice because they have, you know, trees.)
Technology is a fickle thing. The first production passenger car was created in 1886. The model t came out in 1908. We have had cars for 150 years, but that doesn't mean that they will be the standard for the next 150 years. In my life I have seen the land line telephone and radio go from core fixtures in a house to rare techno-memorabilia. (My house actually has a telephone nook. How many houses have tv nooks built for old CRT displays that will never be needed?) If you told me 25 years ago I wouldn't have a land line in the future I would have been shocked. Now it is ridiculous to even consider getting one and I haven't had one for a decade. Can you even buy a land line phone anymore?
Transportation is going through many massive changes right now. I haven't driven to the office in a decade. Huge segments of the workforce are migrating to exoburbs because they don't need to drive to work anymore. My son hasn't mentioned wanting to drive. My neighbor's kid flat out says she doesn't want to learn (both will be able to soon) and many of their friends don't want to learn either. There is a generation growing up far less invested in the car than the generation before them. Some of the points in this article may not be perfect, predicting the future is a fools bet, but it sure feels like the trend they are bringing up is real.
> Because a single autonomous vehicle operating in a shared fleet can replace multiple privately owned cars, the widespread adoption of this technology can’t help but reduce new-car sales volumes.
The idea that that a huge number of people will give up their private cars for robot-taxis in the next 20 years is laughable. They don't even exist in the vast majority of the country, and it's not even clear that they can function everywhere with our current technology. In just the past year we've seen how the technology we have today is still struggling with how to properly deal with basic things like red traffic lights and school buses.
They haven't even come close to replacing the private cars in the few areas where they do operate. Most people like to be able to go wherever they want whenever they want without begging someone else to come and get them then waiting around for the ride to show up. They like to keep stuff in their cars. They like not having to worry about availability or surge pricing/price gouging or that a lost phone or dead battery or broken app will leave them stranded. If anything will keep Americans from buying new cars it will be because they can't afford them. You can bet it won't be the sudden popularity of "Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft"!
One reason I'm starting to see turn people away from new cars are the anti-features. My next new car will already be an old car because I don't want a camera recording my face the entire time I drive, or microphones recording my conversations, or basic controls buried in touchscreen menus, or features that cause my car to brake unexpectedly or jerk the wheel suddenly from under my hands, or make me pay a monthly subscription fee for anything. I don't want a car that gets software updates over the air. I don't want it internet connected at all. I want my car to work for me and do what I tell it to do.
The very first line begins: Take a look around the American automotive landscape
Which seems is a prevailing mindset of the US administration (which infects those at lower, but still leadership, levels due to the short term legal and financial 'influence' of the administration): Denial of the changing world. Classic uber-conservatism, which works until it, explosively or revolutionarily, breaks. The ripples of which affect the innocent most of all.
(I'm more progressive than conservative, for roughly my own definition of what those loaded terms mean, but I'm also aware of the social problems caused by uber-progressiveness, which bumps up against humanity's basic resistance to change, or too much change too quickly).
The world kinda feels stuck between the 'uber' of both sides, with very little conversation covering the majority middle.
First, personal flying vehicles are definitely not going to be a common mode of transportation. If and when this happens, it will be for ultra rich, select few people, effectively replacing a private helicopter. We don't have the infrastructure, regulation or technology to have millions of people buzzing around in their astro-ford like the fifth element - this is still very much science fiction.
Second, scooters and bikes need infrastructure, which in 99.99% of the US, is not made for this. In fact, current infrastructure is very much hostile to bicycles and scooters, so in order for this to work, there's going to have to be a massive investment in new infrastructure all over the US. Is this very likely? I wouldn't say so.
The US locked itself into using cars through massive, expensive infrastructure and culture and I don't see this changing easily.
The population growth slowing might be true, but it's still growing, and there's still a profit to be made there.
The new factories are going to replace manufacturing in foreign countries. I'm not sure the effects on supply will be drastic. It's just a matter of building cars domestically, avoiding tariffs and securing domestic pipelines.
Finally, asking these corporations to "look 20 years ahead" instead of maximizing short term profits, is a common tradeoff that they are all aware of. Currently, short term gains is what's being preferred in almost every industry. I doubt any board members will vote to leave money on the table for long term benefits. More money now always wins.
> First, personal flying vehicles are definitely not going to be a common mode of transportation. If and when this happens, it will be for ultra rich, select few people, effectively replacing a private helicopter.
I wonder what it would be like for most cars to be replaced with flying cars (i.e. helicopters). I think the noise alone would be a huge issue. Helicopters can be heard from extremely far away and are quite noisy. If you multiply that by like 1 million in a metropolis, I think that would approach unbearable, specially at nighttime, etc.. Also I don't think noise can be reduced too much, including electric propulsion. Propeller engineering would give you some reduction but still I think too much for near universal usage.
But I think the main thing is just cost. Electric aircraft like that would really be just too expensive for everyone to have em. Not everyone can afford a good old (electric) automobile today.
There's also battery technology needing a significant improvement.
Regulation and infrastructure is comparatively solvable I think.
> We don't have the infrastructure, regulation or technology to have millions of people buzzing around in their astro-ford like the fifth element - this is still very much science fiction.
If by flying cars you mean flying robotaxies, then all you need are landing pads. They can be easily accomodated on top of buildings. And regulation for what? We already know how to fky helicopters by autopilot, no need for innovation stiffling with more regulation.
If they are supposed to replace cars we'd need so many of these landing pads. No idea how this is supposed to work. I'm the suburbs it's unclear where you'd put them. Where do I walk to fly this to Costco? Does it land on the Costco warehouse next to an entire line of these arriving instead of cars today?
In proper downtown areas I suspect even if you'd cover every rooftop in these it wouldn't be enough capacity
All the major US OEMs are dead companies walking. Even the CEO of Ford said if Chinese automobiles are allowed into the US it will be the death of US manufacturing.
Total acknowledgment US vehicles are inferior, but no desire or drive to compete, only stifle.
It’s sad, and the outcome is entirely predictable.
It's even predictable and inevitable based on that fundamental tenet of capitalism: the market.
It's weird kinda knowing what the outcome is going to be, but not knowing exactly how we're going to get there and how long it's going to take. Feels like it's all in slow motion.
But you're right in terms of, if they don't get bailed out it could bring pain to certain demographics that any side of politics doesn't want to get blamed for. It's hard to see either side making the difficult decision to inflict mid-term pain for, maybe, very long term gain. Not a concept voters will accept.
Need a consolidation auto-makers in the US to maybe rationalise things a bit?
Some car companies are purposefully positioning themselves to have fewer customers as they've learned that they are much more profitable selling a small number of high margin vehicles to a few people instead of a large number of low margin vehicles to a lot of people.
Maybe if companies actually cared for their employees, paid them more, provided excellent security, worked with unions. Maybe it won’t all come crashing down.
Maybe if the venture capitalists private equity, and their billionaire handlers didn’t fuck around with every industry that working people depend on. Then maybe the flow of goods would continue.
Maybe if C-level idiots invested profits into the companies rather than in short term gains (ie, stock buybacks). Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation where a collective <1% of people own a majority of the capital.
If we had a government that actually cared about the welfare of its citizens, we wouldn’t have to depend on companies that enshittify their products and betray their founding principles. Imagine an ecosystem where you didn’t have to force yourself to go to a shitty job you hate because you depend on it for healthcare (fuck private health insurance), an income, and other needs.
America is the richest country in the world yet a majority of citizens are pushed to the brink of poverty despite working 40+ hrs.
Because a single autonomous vehicle operating in a shared
fleet can replace multiple privately owned cars, the
widespread adoption of this technology can’t help but
reduce new-car sales volumes.
The old "Thing will become more useful so we'll make less of it" argument. No mention of Jevons Paradox?
If we can travel and send stuff around from point A to point B cheaply and instantly by dropping ourselves or an item into an ocean of cars roaming our streets autonomously, there is a lot more demand for rides.
Also comfortably traveling longer distances might alter where we live. If we can walk out the door, sit down in a comfortable robotaxi right away and exit in the city center 10 minutes later, we might not have to live right in the city center anymore. Another driver for more demand.
I doubt that here. Cars are already near saturation, at least in the US.
Essentially everyone has a car. The car is mostly idle. If car availability starts to approach instant then people don't need personal vehicles that are idle 95% of the time. Car quantity overall goes down unless you can 20x current utilization, which is a lot of trips and fuel.
Not to mention that if anything resembling current quantity of extant cars becomes the current quantity of cars using roadways at a given moment, most cities will gridlock.
If the thesis is "cars will approach 50% or greater utilization" then car numbers must drop barring a massive increase in road capacity for which the land does not exist.
Cars that are idle 95% of the time are replaced less than once in a decade.
Cabs are replaced something like 3x more often than privately owned cars. And when they run 24/7 because of self-driving, that factor will even increase.
> If the thesis is "cars will approach 50% or greater utilization" then car numbers must drop barring a massive increase in road capacity for which the land does not exist.
You can build stacked roads a few levels up. Capacity doubles or triples without any significant land use.
I wish HN commenters would stop bringing up Jevon's Paradox:
1. We see it mentioned all the time now, i.e. When AI makes producing software essentially free, there'll be more jobs. As HN has maybe 75% of the frontpage filled with AI stories, it means we see it almost every single day!
2. It essentially describes outliers. Driving food costs down to a fraction of the peak price (basically down by 90% over the last 200 years) did not result in correspondingly higher food consumption.
3. It only applies when the market is not yet saturated. Making cars more fuel efficient (by going EV) in the last 5 years did not result in correspondingly more miles being driven.
Any time you feel compelled to bring up Jevon's Paradox, ask yourself "Are we talking about energy here?" and if the answer is "No" then it probably doesn't apply.
Keep in mind that even if Jevon's Paradox applies, it does not mean that the society actually benefits. If you drive the value of all human labour to almost zero, you can't use Jevon's Paradox as an argument that the increased efficiency means that we're all living a life of leisure.
We don't need fleets of autonomous vehicles, each carrying two tons of metal for transporting a person or two and clogging up cities. We just need a train network that doesn't suck.
One of the most important ways to make a train network that doesn't suck is to aggressively police the sorts of antisocial behavior on public transit committed by the most marginalized people in society. There are a lot of political barriers to actually doing this, not the least of which is that it necessarily involves incarcerating more marginalized people, using more police violence against marginalized people, and inevitably having the police kill more marginalized people.
If you're reaction to Daniel Penny's killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City Subway isn't "Daniel Penny was a hero, Jordan Neely should have been incarcerated rather than allowed to freely exist on the train, and everyone involved in Penny's prosecution should be thrown out of positions of power", then you can't actually make the train network not suck.
Well if we did that we'd only save 40,000 lives and ~$1T in transit costs a year. Such savings and improvements in quality of life are unthinkable in the US! \s
You sell less to people living in the cities but maybe you sell more to the operators of fleets of rental cars, even self driving if that really becomes mainstream. Not enough to match the decrease of sales.
You keep selling to people living in countryside, where you don't go anywhere without a car and where fleets of cars would have to be very large to be able to cover the territory in a meaningful way. There will be less and less people living there but it could affect the kind of cars that are manufactured. By the way, a self driving car would be very useful to elderly people living in their house far away from the nearest town.
In any case, less cars.
People in cities decided they wanted less car-centric infrastructure.
People in cities demanded EVs, yet didn't show up to keep buying them.
People in cities apparently know best what car companies should build, yet they don't buy the cars.
Car companies build for suburbanites.
Suburbanites buy cars.
Little of what you said is based on fact, only grievance.
Very few cities in the us are actively anti car, and the ones that are, are dense enough that vehicle emissions are a local problem for them.
We’re not demanding evs for ourselves, we’re demanding gas cars stop gassing our homes. You want to drive a v8 dually? Great, go nuts! Keep it out of SF!
> only grievance
They're ripping up lanes of traffic in my city and replacing them with bike lanes that nobody uses.
The busy intersection next to my home used to take all of 15 seconds to turn at, now I get stuck for five to six minutes at a time because they now forbid right turns on red and stuck left turners in front of right turners.
Meanwhile, nobody is using the bike lanes.
The bike lanes are gender and age inequitable, favor low-commercial activity, and hamper productive economic activities. Not only that, but they're unusable in inclement and hot weather, which my city experiences frequently.
I drive a car because I'm buying things, traveling with family, and spending hundreds of dollars. People on bikes are not doing these things and are not contributing to the tax base as much as car drivers. A typical bike rider's coffee and book reading activities do not match a trip to Target and a local restaurant with family in terms of economic impact.
Now multiply that times every car rider who is being delayed and disrupted. All of this spending is now being delayed or even prevented.
We're going to feel really silly when we need more lanes for all the autonomous vehicles that will come online in the next 15 years. Autonomous vehicles - transportation, logistics, last mile delivery, ordering robotics services, etc. - are going to be a billion times more important than bikes.
Just go to a park or get a gym membership if you want to exercise. Or, better yet, take your bike with you on your car and drive to the countryside trails.
> People on bikes are not doing these things and are not contributing to the tax base as much as car drivers
If you live in car dependent suburbia, sure. And it sounds like you do.
And again, little of what you said is based on fact, only grievance.
I think it takes time for demand to build. Certainly cities like London have seen huge growth in bike use. In my own home town(which is by no means flat) I'm seeing lots of cargo bikes, especially around tge school run.
To your point on bike owners not contributing to the economy. They probably have a similar income, and are paying similar taxes. They are still buying groceries. But where they choose to spend their money is different. It's all still economic activity though.
> People in cities demanded EVs, yet didn't show up to keep buying them.
That's only natural, because two kinds of people want EVs in cities (with some overlap). The first kind wants less noise, less pollution and fewer gas stations inside the city - they want other people to buy EVs, but don't want a car themselves. The second wants to own an EV because it's green and efficient.
> Car companies build for suburbanites.
And for $100, where are the majority of consumers often located
Cars have become obscenely expensive and auto makers seem to be incorporating more and more planned obsolescence into their designs, so I've decided I'm just going to keep driving my aging car for as long as I can and maybe just get an e-bike for short trips to the market. It really feels like the auto industry is made up of dinosaurs who don't see the asteroid coming their way.
If your theory is true we might see an era where supply vastly exceeds demand and car manufacturers will need to offset brand new vehicles to keep cash flow going. Sounds great to me, sign me up for 20$k brand new Ford when the time’s ready.
> If your theory is true we might see an era where supply vastly exceeds demand and car manufacturers will need to offset brand new vehicles to keep cash flow going. Sounds great to me, sign me up for 20$k brand new Ford when the time’s ready.
The car manufacturers could have staved this off - they keep developing new models with little to no marginal improvement. Once we got seatbelts, airbags and similar in cars, there's literally no reason for a new model to drop, but here we are with new models dropping every 5 years, using parts that don't fit the old model!
Maybe if they were dropping only new types of cars (say, EVs), I could see a need, but there's no reason a 2010 Toyota has to be replaced by a 2024 - you have the jigs, the factory, the supply chain for parts already. Just keep making it and charge less.
There are plenty of 2010 Toyotas still out there, running great, if you want one. The market has instead demanded more different-looking cars (for variety), and generally larger vehicles with a higher riding position, not to mention newer creature comforts like air conditioned seats, and safety features like beeping at you when a car is in your blind spot and you try to change lanes.
The evidence that this is what the market demands is that Toyota is selling tons of new vehicles, despite the 2010 Toyotas still being available (used) for a lot less money.
> There are plenty of 2010 Toyotas still out there, running great, if you want one.
That's not my point. My point is that the billions poured into designing the three new generations of Toyota since 2010 did not have to be spent by Toyota.
But they did spend it, to design new cars, with little to no actual improvements, and so they have had to price their new cars appropriately, to recoup the cost.
What would a brand new Toyota cost today if billions of dollars were not spent in designing a whole new car, with all new incompatible parts, and all-new jigs? Would we still be looking at $40k for a brand new car?
It was going so well until it mentioned VTOL aircraft. It's been 100 years of this sci-fi dream man, people need to understand that nobody wants drones or "flying cars" above their head or property...
> The traditional, reliable cycle of a new wave of teenagers getting their driver’s licenses and buying cars is shrinking.
Are these teenagers buying new cars in the room with us now?
It's about time they stop blaming us millennials for everything wrong.
The parents buy the new car and keep the older one for the teenager.
Happy to live in a place where I can get anywhere without a car.
"Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft are on track to provide urban air transit within the next few years, targeting the high-margin commuters who traditionally buy premium vehicles."
Okay. So... flying cars? Don't think so. Robotaxis make sense where taxis make sense and you can get by without a car already. The demographic decline is real.
There's the simple physics of a vtol craft when landing needing to push down a lot of a air very fast just to lift an average human - plus the weight of the craft itself. There's a reason helicopters today don't land on street corners even if there's no rotor clearance issues. And these "personal" VTOLs don't seem any lighter than a helicopter of a similar size - for example the "Air One" is twice the mass of a Robinson R22 - ~400 vs ~970 kg empty.
The idea that they would be common enough to seriously disrupt "personal transport", even restricting to the "premium" market as it's known today is crazy. Imagine a fancy party where every 10 seconds everyone on the red carpet is being blown away by the backwash of someone landing - also disrupting everyone else trying to land there at the same time.
They are talking about unmanned drones that operate as flying taxis. They have them in China. We will never have flying cars after 9/11 showed how flying objects can damage property.
It's not 9/11 that will kill it but people not wanting 2 tons of metal flying overhead. The occasional helicopter is one thing. Having hundreds of these flying around, when one can clip a building from a gust of wind and go plummeting into bystanders is a no-go.
Not to mention the noise. Residential neighborhoods will ban these immediately (and some won't have a choice because they have, you know, trees.)
Technology is a fickle thing. The first production passenger car was created in 1886. The model t came out in 1908. We have had cars for 150 years, but that doesn't mean that they will be the standard for the next 150 years. In my life I have seen the land line telephone and radio go from core fixtures in a house to rare techno-memorabilia. (My house actually has a telephone nook. How many houses have tv nooks built for old CRT displays that will never be needed?) If you told me 25 years ago I wouldn't have a land line in the future I would have been shocked. Now it is ridiculous to even consider getting one and I haven't had one for a decade. Can you even buy a land line phone anymore?
Transportation is going through many massive changes right now. I haven't driven to the office in a decade. Huge segments of the workforce are migrating to exoburbs because they don't need to drive to work anymore. My son hasn't mentioned wanting to drive. My neighbor's kid flat out says she doesn't want to learn (both will be able to soon) and many of their friends don't want to learn either. There is a generation growing up far less invested in the car than the generation before them. Some of the points in this article may not be perfect, predicting the future is a fools bet, but it sure feels like the trend they are bringing up is real.
Regular people have less real disposable income than before, and risky financial products can only conceal the truth for a certain period.
Eventually, the truth will emerge, possibly with the collapse of the auto subprime loans and the car financing industry.
Fewer people means fewer cars, and I’m confident the auto company leaders know this very well.
But what to do?
Don’t build factory capacity and manifest decline? Not likely.
They’re betting success will find a way and those factories will be needed. It’s all they can really do.
> Because a single autonomous vehicle operating in a shared fleet can replace multiple privately owned cars, the widespread adoption of this technology can’t help but reduce new-car sales volumes.
The idea that that a huge number of people will give up their private cars for robot-taxis in the next 20 years is laughable. They don't even exist in the vast majority of the country, and it's not even clear that they can function everywhere with our current technology. In just the past year we've seen how the technology we have today is still struggling with how to properly deal with basic things like red traffic lights and school buses.
They haven't even come close to replacing the private cars in the few areas where they do operate. Most people like to be able to go wherever they want whenever they want without begging someone else to come and get them then waiting around for the ride to show up. They like to keep stuff in their cars. They like not having to worry about availability or surge pricing/price gouging or that a lost phone or dead battery or broken app will leave them stranded. If anything will keep Americans from buying new cars it will be because they can't afford them. You can bet it won't be the sudden popularity of "Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft"!
One reason I'm starting to see turn people away from new cars are the anti-features. My next new car will already be an old car because I don't want a camera recording my face the entire time I drive, or microphones recording my conversations, or basic controls buried in touchscreen menus, or features that cause my car to brake unexpectedly or jerk the wheel suddenly from under my hands, or make me pay a monthly subscription fee for anything. I don't want a car that gets software updates over the air. I don't want it internet connected at all. I want my car to work for me and do what I tell it to do.
... in the US
The very first line begins: Take a look around the American automotive landscape
Which seems is a prevailing mindset of the US administration (which infects those at lower, but still leadership, levels due to the short term legal and financial 'influence' of the administration): Denial of the changing world. Classic uber-conservatism, which works until it, explosively or revolutionarily, breaks. The ripples of which affect the innocent most of all.
(I'm more progressive than conservative, for roughly my own definition of what those loaded terms mean, but I'm also aware of the social problems caused by uber-progressiveness, which bumps up against humanity's basic resistance to change, or too much change too quickly).
The world kinda feels stuck between the 'uber' of both sides, with very little conversation covering the majority middle.
A few points worth contending.
First, personal flying vehicles are definitely not going to be a common mode of transportation. If and when this happens, it will be for ultra rich, select few people, effectively replacing a private helicopter. We don't have the infrastructure, regulation or technology to have millions of people buzzing around in their astro-ford like the fifth element - this is still very much science fiction.
Second, scooters and bikes need infrastructure, which in 99.99% of the US, is not made for this. In fact, current infrastructure is very much hostile to bicycles and scooters, so in order for this to work, there's going to have to be a massive investment in new infrastructure all over the US. Is this very likely? I wouldn't say so.
The US locked itself into using cars through massive, expensive infrastructure and culture and I don't see this changing easily.
The population growth slowing might be true, but it's still growing, and there's still a profit to be made there.
The new factories are going to replace manufacturing in foreign countries. I'm not sure the effects on supply will be drastic. It's just a matter of building cars domestically, avoiding tariffs and securing domestic pipelines.
Finally, asking these corporations to "look 20 years ahead" instead of maximizing short term profits, is a common tradeoff that they are all aware of. Currently, short term gains is what's being preferred in almost every industry. I doubt any board members will vote to leave money on the table for long term benefits. More money now always wins.
> First, personal flying vehicles are definitely not going to be a common mode of transportation. If and when this happens, it will be for ultra rich, select few people, effectively replacing a private helicopter.
I wonder what it would be like for most cars to be replaced with flying cars (i.e. helicopters). I think the noise alone would be a huge issue. Helicopters can be heard from extremely far away and are quite noisy. If you multiply that by like 1 million in a metropolis, I think that would approach unbearable, specially at nighttime, etc.. Also I don't think noise can be reduced too much, including electric propulsion. Propeller engineering would give you some reduction but still I think too much for near universal usage.
But I think the main thing is just cost. Electric aircraft like that would really be just too expensive for everyone to have em. Not everyone can afford a good old (electric) automobile today.
There's also battery technology needing a significant improvement.
Regulation and infrastructure is comparatively solvable I think.
> We don't have the infrastructure, regulation or technology to have millions of people buzzing around in their astro-ford like the fifth element - this is still very much science fiction.
If by flying cars you mean flying robotaxies, then all you need are landing pads. They can be easily accomodated on top of buildings. And regulation for what? We already know how to fky helicopters by autopilot, no need for innovation stiffling with more regulation.
If they are supposed to replace cars we'd need so many of these landing pads. No idea how this is supposed to work. I'm the suburbs it's unclear where you'd put them. Where do I walk to fly this to Costco? Does it land on the Costco warehouse next to an entire line of these arriving instead of cars today?
In proper downtown areas I suspect even if you'd cover every rooftop in these it wouldn't be enough capacity
The automobile itself was initially nothing more than a toy for the rich and powerful.
All the major US OEMs are dead companies walking. Even the CEO of Ford said if Chinese automobiles are allowed into the US it will be the death of US manufacturing.
Total acknowledgment US vehicles are inferior, but no desire or drive to compete, only stifle.
It’s sad, and the outcome is entirely predictable.
... and inevitable.
It's even predictable and inevitable based on that fundamental tenet of capitalism: the market.
It's weird kinda knowing what the outcome is going to be, but not knowing exactly how we're going to get there and how long it's going to take. Feels like it's all in slow motion.
I also want to hold a short position on them, but the number of times they’ll be bailed out is essentially infinite, so that won’t work.
Go short soon before the next US election maybe?
But you're right in terms of, if they don't get bailed out it could bring pain to certain demographics that any side of politics doesn't want to get blamed for. It's hard to see either side making the difficult decision to inflict mid-term pain for, maybe, very long term gain. Not a concept voters will accept.
Need a consolidation auto-makers in the US to maybe rationalise things a bit?
Some car companies are purposefully positioning themselves to have fewer customers as they've learned that they are much more profitable selling a small number of high margin vehicles to a few people instead of a large number of low margin vehicles to a lot of people.
Capitalism. Once you Acknowledge the problem, you're gonna get punished
This anti-capitalism mind virus is concerning.
Maybe if companies actually cared for their employees, paid them more, provided excellent security, worked with unions. Maybe it won’t all come crashing down.
Maybe if the venture capitalists private equity, and their billionaire handlers didn’t fuck around with every industry that working people depend on. Then maybe the flow of goods would continue.
Maybe if C-level idiots invested profits into the companies rather than in short term gains (ie, stock buybacks). Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation where a collective <1% of people own a majority of the capital.
If we had a government that actually cared about the welfare of its citizens, we wouldn’t have to depend on companies that enshittify their products and betray their founding principles. Imagine an ecosystem where you didn’t have to force yourself to go to a shitty job you hate because you depend on it for healthcare (fuck private health insurance), an income, and other needs.
America is the richest country in the world yet a majority of citizens are pushed to the brink of poverty despite working 40+ hrs.
« Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft are on track to provide urban air transit within the next few years»
Just a couple thousand years of ground/wheel based infrastructure to rework in that few years.
Better get to it.
If we can travel and send stuff around from point A to point B cheaply and instantly by dropping ourselves or an item into an ocean of cars roaming our streets autonomously, there is a lot more demand for rides.
Also comfortably traveling longer distances might alter where we live. If we can walk out the door, sit down in a comfortable robotaxi right away and exit in the city center 10 minutes later, we might not have to live right in the city center anymore. Another driver for more demand.
I doubt that here. Cars are already near saturation, at least in the US.
Essentially everyone has a car. The car is mostly idle. If car availability starts to approach instant then people don't need personal vehicles that are idle 95% of the time. Car quantity overall goes down unless you can 20x current utilization, which is a lot of trips and fuel.
Not to mention that if anything resembling current quantity of extant cars becomes the current quantity of cars using roadways at a given moment, most cities will gridlock.
If the thesis is "cars will approach 50% or greater utilization" then car numbers must drop barring a massive increase in road capacity for which the land does not exist.
Who exactly will be cleaning and sanitizing these self-driving cars that are getting this 50%-or-greater utilization?
Have you taken public transportation in the US? The answer is obvious: nobody.
Roombas.
> Car quantity overall goes down unless you can 20x current utilization, which is a lot of trips and fuel.
Pretty much every self-driving car will be electric; battery charge has a very different set of considerations than fuel tanks do.
Cars that are idle 95% of the time are replaced less than once in a decade.
Cabs are replaced something like 3x more often than privately owned cars. And when they run 24/7 because of self-driving, that factor will even increase.
> If the thesis is "cars will approach 50% or greater utilization" then car numbers must drop barring a massive increase in road capacity for which the land does not exist.
You can build stacked roads a few levels up. Capacity doubles or triples without any significant land use.
That sounds like an absolute dystopian nightmare. Can we instead just design cities so they don't depend on cars as much?
Visit Amsterdam, then visit LA. Tell me which place is more pleasant to be in.
> No mention of Jevons Paradox?
I wish HN commenters would stop bringing up Jevon's Paradox:
1. We see it mentioned all the time now, i.e. When AI makes producing software essentially free, there'll be more jobs. As HN has maybe 75% of the frontpage filled with AI stories, it means we see it almost every single day!
2. It essentially describes outliers. Driving food costs down to a fraction of the peak price (basically down by 90% over the last 200 years) did not result in correspondingly higher food consumption.
3. It only applies when the market is not yet saturated. Making cars more fuel efficient (by going EV) in the last 5 years did not result in correspondingly more miles being driven.
Any time you feel compelled to bring up Jevon's Paradox, ask yourself "Are we talking about energy here?" and if the answer is "No" then it probably doesn't apply.
Keep in mind that even if Jevon's Paradox applies, it does not mean that the society actually benefits. If you drive the value of all human labour to almost zero, you can't use Jevon's Paradox as an argument that the increased efficiency means that we're all living a life of leisure.
Where do the cheap cars come from? Fuel and electricity aren’t free
This is the dumbest possible approach.
We don't need fleets of autonomous vehicles, each carrying two tons of metal for transporting a person or two and clogging up cities. We just need a train network that doesn't suck.
One of the most important ways to make a train network that doesn't suck is to aggressively police the sorts of antisocial behavior on public transit committed by the most marginalized people in society. There are a lot of political barriers to actually doing this, not the least of which is that it necessarily involves incarcerating more marginalized people, using more police violence against marginalized people, and inevitably having the police kill more marginalized people.
If you're reaction to Daniel Penny's killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City Subway isn't "Daniel Penny was a hero, Jordan Neely should have been incarcerated rather than allowed to freely exist on the train, and everyone involved in Penny's prosecution should be thrown out of positions of power", then you can't actually make the train network not suck.
Well if we did that we'd only save 40,000 lives and ~$1T in transit costs a year. Such savings and improvements in quality of life are unthinkable in the US! \s