With self driving smart cars, I can see people subscribing to taxi service instead of a owning a car.
harry On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 6:50 PM, Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson < > orionwo...@charter.net> wrote: > >> Hopefully economies of scale will eventually lower the entry level >> price to around $10k. That would give the Smart Car a run for its money. >> > Even 10k dollars feels steep for a car that was manufactured out of > plastic with a 1 million dollar printer and assembled with minimal labor. > Once this technology is more widespread, a company like Google will get > irritated at the steep markup and begin to look into what it would take to > offer them at 2-4k. > > Note that cheaper cars means more drivers and more fuel consumption. > Perhaps there are not enough people in absolute terms that fit that > demographic in North America and Europe to matter. But there could be > plenty in China, India and Africa in the medium term. > > European cities were largely in place before cars came along, and they > have pleasant, dense city centers and viable mass transportation. North > American cities came along just as cars were being widely adopted, and they > are spread out and unattractive for that reason. In many European cities > you can get along just fine without a car for much of the time. In many > North American cities you pretty much need a car, and viable mass transit > is hard to put in place because the population density is fairly low. > > Eric > >
