Quote:
Originally Posted by BCPhil
My assumption is pretty baseline: if Cars as a Service is going to replace car ownership, then that most likely means people will use it at least as much as they use a car they own. Why else would most people switch ownership models? It has to be at least as useful AND cheaper.
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I'm not 100% sure that's going to happen. The huge difference between owning a car and renting a car is that when you rent all of the costs are made explicit. Instead of paying most of the cost as a fixed up-front amount (buying the car and paying insurance annually), you've got to pony money up for every trip. That's a pretty significant psychological shift, and the aversion of people to tolls shows that a lot of people go to lengths to avoid those kinds of explicit costs.
I was without a car for a few months and I joined Car2Go. I found that the per-minute billing caused me a lot of driving stress - suddenly every time I had to stop for a traffic light I could feel the minutes ticking away. And it was silly because I knew that for the trips I made all of those Car2Go costs end up being cheaper than owning a car. But that didn't stop me from feeling that pressure and, in the end, buying another car, mainly for the convenience but also so that I could make trips without having to feel pressured about those incremental costs.
And (to bring the thread back toward the forum topic), you can probably see a similar effect with bike shares.