Comment by nvch
Comment by nvch 9 hours ago
For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.
Comment by nvch 9 hours ago
For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.
As a woman, while 95% of the ridesharing trips I take are perfectly pleasant and sometimes great with conversation the 5% of rides where you are trapped in a car with a creep asking you extremely off putting questions sours the entire concept of ride sharing for me.
Same. Ever been a vulnerable woman stuck in a car with a man who starts ranting that "nobody wants to date men who aren't rich anymore" and it turns out the driver is angry because the women that are trapped as riders won't go out with him?
Or how about, "Nice place...you live alone here?"
Absolutely would choose the robot.
Yea, I can't imagine being a woman and having to deal with some of these drivers.
This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.
I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.
the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.
Erm, what would you propose as an alternative answer?
Presumably women are giving those creepy drivers bad ratings, and yet they are still on the road. So, that's clearly not working.
Sure, the US should fix their transit system, but that doesn't help women now.
So, the default answer becomes, "Get your own car, plebe." And that's super expensive and requires you to drive.
Or, a woman can take a Waymo.
I'm right there with you about hating the megajillionaires, but I'm open to hearing your alternative suggestions.
> Is it really that bad to share a car with someone?
Sometimes it is, and you never really know when.
Some of my most unpleasant experiences involved a couple of reckless drivers, even more nutters who insisted on talking about their politics or pet peeves, I fear one of them may have gone beyond mere eccentricity and probably required some medical intervention, but couldn't figure out how to report that without possibly resulting in the driver being punished by the app.
Hah, I had a 2am conversation with a woman from Argentina about Javier Milei which is one of my Uber riding highlights.
But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.
One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.
Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
I’m fine to share a car. I’m less keen on dying in one.
Riding in a car is easily the most dangerous thing I do in my daily life and my subjective impression of how well uber/lyft/taxi drivers drive is not great.
The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.
I always (as soon as I could) owned a car, first on independence, but soon that became on price. A car costs between $350 and $500 per month, plus about 2 gas tanks, let's say $600. That's only 10-15 short taxi rides and two long taxi rides at best.
And now I have a family, there's 5 of us. A car is easily less than half the price of public transport for what I need to do (because you pay per person).
I hate traffic, and I don't really like driving, but since a car is easily 30 minutes faster than public transport to drive in to work, sadly 30 minutes of traffic in the morning is still faster than public transport, no matter how annoying it is. Oh and no waiting in the rain/cold is a nice bonus.
A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month. If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a nicer more luxurious car for yourself. But it’s just ingenious to compare that against taxis with beaten-up and spartan but reliable cars.
That's not outrageous as a car price once you add insurance, maintenance, taxes, parking, license fee, cleaning, etc
Along with any interest on the purchase or foregone investment gains. You can use a true cost of ownership calculator here.
https://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/2022/cost-to-own/?style...
The average monthly payment for a used car in the US in 2025 was $532, according to https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-car-paym.... This does not count insurance, taxes, parking, or gas.
A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.
There's no shot that number isn't being driven up by people purchasing more car than they need. You can get a used car for $10,000 or less, there's no reason one needs to pay $500/mo.
There is no tax deduction (in the US) for vehicle use that is non-business related.
> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.
This can vary a lot.
6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month.
Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the car is paid off.
> If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.
You're not including an amortized cost of maintenance, registration fees, etc. Adding in tires alone ($720 for a set, 50k/1200 ~=41 months, ~$17.50/mo) brings it to almost $290/mo. Oil change every 6 months or so, add another $10/mo or so. Now we're at $300/mo and hoping nothing in the car breaks and needs repairs on a car that's already paid off, and we still haven't paid our taxes and registration fees.
Now figure in the fact you've got several thousand dollars in a car instead of even something like a high-yield savings account. At even 4% APY, if you had just $8k tied up in that car that's another ~$27/mo of income you're missing out on.
I'm not making the argument riding a taxi for every trip is cheaper than this. Just pointing out there's a lot of things people don't think about when they think of the cost of car ownership.
> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.
Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.
That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.
And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.
Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of
- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up
- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns
Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.
Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
Hyundai Ioniq 5, backing into the garage next to the RV, and at "backing into the garage" speed ran into the RV. The fiberglass body of the RV suffered a 3 inch diameter break in the fiberglass that I could have fixed myself. The Hyundai? 17,000 American dollars. The rear quarter panel took a dent, and (IIRC) the bumper might have had some damage. Part of the problem was that there really isn't a "rear quarter panel" anymore. No, as I looked at it, that piece of sheet metal goes all the way from the rear bumper to the front of the passenger compartment. The shop didn't replace that piece, but rather cut the dented piece out and welded in new sheet metal.
Between that, and all the sensors, etc., $17K for backing into a piece of fiberglass at not even a walking pace. Now that the car has some years on it, if I do that again they'll probably total it.
huh? i bought a used, very low-end/utilitarian 10 year old car and paid more than half upfront and my monthly payment was like $300. factor in insurance and gas and i was easily close to 400-450. the days of $1000 beaters that actually run well are gone :(
The cost is a factor -- and something that I think policy makers should very much push to change.
For our family of four, two of us pay for public transport as of now. That adds up to $12 round trip; which is often more expensive than parking in the even in a high density area. Once we have to start paying for the kids too, that would add up to $24 for a round trip, which ends up being more expensive than driving. I get that public transportation is expensive to operate; maybe that alone is the root of the problem here.
Yes, all those things. Except on cost, at least in SF, MUNI is free for children.
We mostly drive wherever we need to go, especially when it's all of us. But if we're going to a Warriors game, we always take Muni, at it's more convenient (and free for adults too if you show your ticket).
Also, it's generally faster and more convenient (and fun) to get to Chase Center via Muni than driving. Getting back is tough both because this is peak Lyft/Waymo demand as well as peak Muni demand.
I’m guessing you live in America where car ownership is heavily subsidized? Many places you would spend $500/month just to park your car, maybe more.
In most of America there is abundant free parking on private property including homes, stores, and workplaces. That is hardly a subsidy. I understand the argument that dense cities shouldn't have so much free public street parking but there are only a handful of neighborhoods where that even matters.
The "free parking" isn't really free, you just have land that is really cheap devoted to it. And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them. Street parking matters in almost every neighborhood in Seattle now...since parking on its own is expensive, and you will also have to pay for a few busted windows on your car for the pleasure of free street parking.
The highways are heavily subsidized by general funds these days since raising the gas tax outside of a few states isn't very popular.
I'm American but in the other countries I lived in (Switzerland and China) and the many countries I've visited, private car ownership is always a luxury, not a cheap necessety attainable by everyone.
Taxis are not a replacement for having a car for commuting for like 99% of people
This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.