Which is bad news for robotaxis, because they'll have to give the full price upfront.
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Is the 9bn Lower Thames Road crossing approval bad news for rail?
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Which is why I suggested a price of £1/mile (as that's still a saving over a human driven taxi as you're not having to pay a wage and the vehicle could be in use more than 30% of the day) for a car and £0.30 for a bus (as you're likely to carry 3 to 4 times the number of people, so the cost could shared between bookings).
Most people driving only consider fuel costs, so would look at that bus cost and think why would I pay (say) double.
However if you're paying total vehicle costs of £1,500 per year and doing 5,000 miles you're already paying 30p a mile for your travel.
However, if you're paying 13p a mile in fuel costs (£650) VED (£150) insurance (£250) MOT (£50), that doesn't leave you much (£400) for other maintenance, the perchance cost of the car and any other costs (such as parking).
For someone on a lease paying £150/month they could do 6,000 miles a year by bus for the same lease costs (not including any other costs such as fuel, insurance maintenance), beyond 6,000 miles on many years you're paying an excess milage allowance.
It also means you could live in an area with less parking space, which is likely to be cheaper. There's a guide of an extra £10,000 for a parking space on the cost of a home, add that to your mortgage and that's an extra £20,000 in mortgage payments over the term (or £500 a year over 40 years).
That's all before you apply a value to your time and the fact you could save yourself some miles (and maybe some time) by not going door to door.
For example, going to a town centre (be that for work or shopping) you could just end your journey at the nearest edge rather than driving to (and then around) a car park, which whilst not very far each time, if you're doing that for work for 200 times a year and your saving 0.5 miles each time you do that (0.25 miles in and 0.25 miles out) you'll save 100 miles a year (and the cost of parking charges).
Whilst that's not much, if that's in stop/start traffic and normally people are walking faster than you (or you're able to walk a short cut) it could even save you a bit of time on your journey.
HSTEd
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Yes, but software duplication is functionally free and the hardware will become cheap over time, as electronics always do.
So the cost of a driverless capable car will trend towards the cost of an ordinary one.
There's likely to be quite a few people who will not be willing to pay the mileage rate as it's more than their fuel rate, even though the cost to them would actually be lower than owning the car themselves.
However, the bigger issue would be that car companies wouldn't have as much of a market at they currently do as far fewer cars would be needed.
Much as how streaming wrecked the existing music businesses, if shared autonomous cars take off them it'll most likely be a company that doesn't make cars now that will be the market leaders.
Technologist
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Then it will trend to less than the price of a regular one.
Most cars are over specced for what they actually do most of the time. Most family cars are sized for a holiday or a DIY store trip they do a few times a year.
They have a degree of road holding and performance most drivers don't/can't access.
They have loads of rarely used features (space saver wheels, jack, glove
box) that aren't going to be any use on a shared self driving car.
Hence the average self driving car will likely be a two seater with relatively small amounts of storage. Larger multi occupancy vehicles will be hired on demand for families and for congested areas where sharing rides makes sense.
Self driving also means that there is no requirement for any goods items to travel with people anymore. I would imagine that we'll see virtually everything being moved by a new standard of containerisation with different ISO crates being hauled around by road going robots that don't look anything like today's commercial vehicles.
So going on holiday in 10-15 years you won't be moving anything bigger than hand baggage yourself Amazon prime will see your crates sent directly to your hotel room.
It gets even more transformational if you keep pulling the thread. I have a garage full of tools in various states of repair, most of which have been purchased for a job which has seen me drive across town to buy them. If I could get any tool (or any item I use infrequently or seasonally) within 5-10 minutes 24-7 then there is a vast amount of stuff I wouldn't need to store in my house and/or own.
It's one of the answers to how you can keep on having growth on a finite sized country. E.g. while we might not have much bigger houses we might have 2-3 times more household goods than we have today because most of it stored densely in warehouses waiting to be used and hiring stuff is frictionless and cheap.
I'm sure most of us can think of some hobby or interest that we've had to give up or curtail because we don't have space for it. In the future you might just summon it from the warehouse to your "room of requirements".
If you assume the delivery cost of £5 or a monthly subscription of a similar amount, it doesn't take you long to buy out right a reasonable drill.
I don't know how many rolls you have, but most people would have a screwdriver set (these days quite often one handle and multiple interchangeable heads) a socket set, a saw, pliers, saw, drill, maybe spanners, maybe a few other items depending on what you do (for example a keen cyclist may have tools for replacing their chain).
Most of that would fit into a single IKEA cube (the saw being the notable exception), the saving in storage for that would be limited.
The things which take up a lot of space in my house:
- kids toys
- enough bikes for us
- camping stuff
- SUP's
- kitchen items
- food
- clothes
- boardgames
- books
Kids toys, no one is going to offer a lease service on something which is a high risk of getting damaged.
The largest space is bikes, and whilst there's ways of leasing kids bikes they weren't going to be cheap to store and ship between uses, so I'm not sure that's a viable option.
Other than the tent, most of the camping stuff is of low enough price that you're not going to pay to ship it.
SUP's are something you could lease and ship (which could be useful to get sent to where you're going to use them), however that's quite a limited market and again is quite costly due to the weight of them.
Kitchen items, a lot of the space needed for this is taken up by cookware, roasting trays, crockery, cutlery and lunchboxs which we use on a weekly basis. Whilst there's stuff we use less than monthly it's either not very big or not very expensive.
Food, most of this is stuff we use all the time (breakfast cereals being probably the worst for taking up space, especially when one box is nearly empty and we've got another ready to use) however even things which are used less frequently are of low cost so not worth moving about.
Clothing, as we have kids, some of this is down to storing seasonal costs and clothing waiting for the next child to eat too use it, otherwise most other things are used as the time. However again the value is fairly low and doesn't take too much space.
Boardgames is potentially the one area where a lease/delivery service could be useful as it could allow me to play a wider range of games than I own. However, for many people, there's boardgame cafes which can fulfill this - with the added bonus of providing the playing surface.
Books are easy enough to get rid of and borrow as you need them (either physical copies or electric copies to read or listen to are readily available from local library services), unless you are looking for something like for hobbies or other specific topics - but then again their low enough value and limit size to make the lease/delivery of them not viable.
For some people bigger savings in space might be achieved by getting rid of stuff they don't actually need - do you use it/have a specific plan to use it, does it give you joy/remind you of someone important, if you keep this is there something else which you could get rid of as it does a similar task (see previous questions)?
By far the largest space needed to store something actually I haven't said yet (assuming we're not counting the home) that being the storage of a car.
Arguably, having transport boxes to take your stuff places for you and being able to lease/ship would make walking, cycling and public transport more attractive as you could (as an example) go to the beach for the day and your stuff be delivered to you (located by linking to you phone), especially if that delivery was via drone as it could be to where your are going to sit down not some car park half a mile away.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
The biggest driver of clutter is being able to afford things that a century ago we would borrow.
When labour was cheaper we probably paid someone else to use their tools. The rise of diy...
Tools. I have a vast portfolio of them. But I drew the line at a circular chop saw - I was given one but its very bulky and I use a hand saw seldom enough - so I managed to refund it unused.
But still I am shorter of space than I am of money.
There is probably a hoarder in all of us.
This is something I have been thinking about. I have for decades had a large estate car of one sort or another.
My next car will be a medium-ish SUV Honda CR-V upto 2012.
But I have hired a large van to go camping, it is not as expensive as the road tax for the SUV will be.
I do ask myself why I do not get a really small car.
The answer is I do not use a car much. Coach for long distance and Oyster card within London.
I need a car only for the larger tasks- maybe the answer is a zip car.
Seems I am prepared to have some thing larger than I strictly need - perhaps because i can afford it (just).
Indeed my boot is full of stuff that might come in handy.
If I really analyse it a hire car might give me freedom.
What the hell has this got to do with the Lower Thames Crossing ?.
Well if we bought less clutter and used public transport more then perhaps the Lower Thames Crossing would not be necessary.
But the requirement is for a cultural change - backwards in many peoples eyes.
Isn't going to happen.
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