Why Own A Car?
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I'm asking because I LOVE our car. It's an old gas guzzler but it's ours by golly! I can keep most of my fishing gear in it all the time, we have our bag of shopping bags, a couple of water bottles, and so forth. We sometimes go buy sandwiches and coffees and drive to the beach to watch a sunset, or head down the coast on a trip to VISIT ALL THE OPP SHOPS! in our region. We'd be lost without it.
Except. . . When I do the sums, our car sees use maybe 150 - 200 hours a year in total. Less than 5% of the time, and the rest, it sits on our driveway rusting and depreciating in value. A little while ago I wrote about how much less expensive an EV is to operate, and it's occurred to me that they also retain far more value than a conventional vehicle. And then I realised that the whole 'total cost of ownership' thing is actually a bit of a Furphy.
I reckon I could probably pack my fishing kit into a fishing bag. We could just - use a folding shopping trolley. And we could always keep the meter running during a beachside dinner.
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| This bag would be a cheap option if I could just ditch the car. |
My point is that if there was a guarantee that I could summon a vehicle within five minutes or less and rent it for as long as I needed (including romantic sandwiches on the beach) then the driveway could become a series of raised gardens or a neighbourhood meeting space with a few tables and chairs.
Profits. And Losses
Profit
And for EV manufacturers, they're missing out on a huge source of income as a car rental company. A car they sell for $100k could earn much larger sums from rental micropayments. Say an EV has a pretty much trouble-free service life of eight years, it costs $35 per day to completely amortise the price they would have gotten, plus charging fees. (Which are negligible if you own a charging park running on renewable energy mostly generated in-house.)
But let's say the vehicle (now that it's on summon call for the public) does 700km a day, at <5c/km that means maybe another $35 in energy costs. I'm working on each vehicle doing around 12hrs of duty a day in a mixed travel public, i.e. some commuters, some doing shopping, some going for a day trip. A rental fee of $6/hr would cover those costs.
You can do much better with good scheduling and ensure that most vehicles operate for 18 hours a day or more. Also consider that the EV actually costs the manufacturer a lot less than it does the end customer. A fee of $3.50 per hour would most likely break even over the first four to five years, and a $5/hr rate would recoup close to twice as much as the manufacturer would have earned from directly selling that car.
Loss
There's location location location, for a start. Where do you house your fleet and their charging park?
Such a venture would also face the consequences of bad drivers damaging the vehicles, and you could maybe also say vandalism and accidents would be a problem, but would it, really? Yes, share e-bikes and e-scooters were a disastrous and economically and ecologically damaging fiasco but they were very insecure.
A person didn't need a driver's license for them and in many cases could get hold of them fraudulently, which added to their perceived low worth, low risk, and thus a high probability for mistreatment. These companies were ahead of the curve in one way, but out of touch with people and people's ethics and morals.
Mitigation
But a car with multiple cameras, sensor systems, an always-on GPS, and a requirement for a hirer to present a valid driver's license and pay a security deposit is another matter. Also, a tighter setting on the autopilot mode can be set to override the driver if they become erratic or dangerous, and in any case, one of the biggest drawcards I can imagine would be that my vehicle is completely autonomous.
There will be large swathes of apartment and office buildings in the beginning, that will have floor after floor of empty car parks. They'll be looking to monetise the wasted space in any way they can, and keeping them as car parks would be a low capital way they could do that.
An operator could strike deals with the real estate owners to lease whole floors of parking and install their own charging facilities, and green energy on the roof. The parking floors don't have to be the most convenient to the occupants or the street, because a car can collaborate with the others to negotiate a quick way out when they're needed.
Incentives
Imagine guaranteeing the apartment owner that there will always be a certain number of vehicles available to occupants at all times. That's just a benefit the owner can then use to make the apartments more appealing to renters.
We're already on the way to having EVs become the dominant vehicles on the road, and once that's os, autonomous driving will become an order of magnitude safer because autonomous vehicles don't have to cope with the unpredictable actions of a human driver. All that's missing is that people exchange their petrol and diesel vehicles for an autonomous one.
As to how to get them there, how's this for an incentive? Each vehicle scrapped (not resold) earns the ex-owner a flat credit towards their hire EV use that's valid for the next ten years. Ditch the private and fleet car and you can have a government-backed subsidy to your smart car rentals for ten years.
Counter-intuitively, that latter works if you accept that in return for just giving your car away to a recycler, you're getting ten years (!!!) worth of transport without another investment into another vehicle, without another cent spent on maintenance or ancillary items like fuel or oil or coolant or even new wiper blades.
Our cart costs us around $100/mth for fuel, and that's because we spend most of our driving life going to the shops or medical appointments. More rarely, we go for a small outing. When you add the cost of all the ancillary items we get maybe another $25/mth, add in servicing about $30/mth. The car costs us $22,000-something over a ten year period.
Oh wait I forgot the on-road costs like registration - that's close to $10,000 in ten years but let's say $7,000 so now the car's cost us $29,000 in ten years or $2,900 a year. And I'm not even figuring in the fact that the average change-over for cars is around 4 - 5 years, and that you never get a free changeover - the least I've ever managed is $5,000 for a newer second-hand car.
Say you change cars twice in that ten years, you'll have lost another $10,000 on average. (I'm referring to trade-ins not private sales, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the worst car trader in the world.) The sum's up to almost four thousand a year you just - lose - on owning a car. $4,000...
Another not immediately obvious incentive is that the car you give to the recycler comes back as a lot of raw materials, and as recycling starts becoming one of the most important industries in the world over the next 2 - 4 years that means new raw materials won't need to be dug out of the ground, and more people be employed recycling.
Analysis
So I'm going to say that driving a car that I own costs me around $330 a month, or $77 a week. Remember we're both retired so we don't commute to work - that would be reflected in the above analysis as whatever further fuel, wear and tear, higher maintenance costs, and lower trade-in value of your car, so we're a very low-use case.
We probably go into town for shopping twice a week, once for groceries and staples, once for a trip to the clothing store or hardware store or garden centre or a department store or something else. And each trip takes under 25 minutes of driving in total. So an hour's rental of an EV should be enough, but to be on the safe side I'll say two. If the rental ends up being $20/hr we'd still have saved $37 a week, almost $2,000 a year.
For anyone that commutes to work (which I gather is a much smaller percentage of workers these days) the savings shrink a tiny bit but I think on the whole they'd still end up with money in their pocket - and best of all, lower carbon emissions, by a significant margin.
Further Than Hire or Rental
Even if a person sprang for a EV in their driveway that they exclusively used, the savings would still mean that they make significant savings over the life of the vehicle - which itself would be almost a decade longer.
Now suppose you kept your car clear of personal belongings (which would make the car you own as characterless as the car you could have rented instead) then several organisations either already exist or are being brought into existence to rent your car out and earn money while you're at work or asleep. But to me that does make the car just another rental and I'd be stuck with a larger insurance premium, less of the security that owning a car is supposed to bring, and I'd never know, when an emergency occurs and I need the car right now and - it's unavailable and an hour away. . .
Plus, one car per household or person is a lot of vehicles, one car per ten - forty people means a lot fewer total cars needed.
Some Nuts And Bolts
Any decent logistics scheduling program these days can predict peaks and valleys in usage, and an AI could make this even more laser-focused on getting people used with the fewest cars on the road at any time. Such software could move cars in and out of charging parks to "taxi ranks" near the highest traffic spots to ensure that no-one waits more than a guaranteed few minutes for a ride, and shuffle cars between charging parks and ranges as needed.
The rentals could be structured as subscriptions, memberships, and casual leases. A subscription could buy you exactly the mileage / time you need per year but at a reduced rate, saving even more. A membership by the year could allow you to randomly hire a car, again at a better rate. And casual leases could be more like taxi rides. Existing taxi drivers could even be employed to drive the casuals and be almost indistinguishable from current taxis except for the lower rates and faster response times.
It just needs US to make companies aware of what we want, and make our governments aware of what we want.
For a last argument in favour of such a share scheme, look at what's happening in Australia right now: Petrol and diesel prices are sky high due to the Ukraine-Russia situation. So high that people are literally taking out loans to fill the tank and buy groceries, and the government have halved their fuel tariff - and admitted what a huge chunk it'll take out of their coffers.
The exact percentage this creates is somewhat muddied because the Australian government charges GST on top of the total fuel price after the excise (tariff) is applied, meaning they're in effect "double dipping" on their excise, which is why the Treasurer is bitching so loudly about it.
But consider that it's estimated that the government takes between 40% and 60% of every fuel dollar, and then figure out how much you're actually paying at the pump - supporting a 'significant part' of the national income...
Also - you'll probably notice that whenever there's a rise in oil prices, the fuel companies manage to raise prices instantly, and when this excise is relaxed, it'll take a week or two for the prices to drop, if they even do.
The energy companies may not be our friends but they're getting cheaper and more sustainable by the week, whereas fuel companies will just continue to gouge us for more and more per litre to keep up with their bottomless thirst for our money... There IS a better way.
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