[meyum33]

I don’t get how personal cars can be rented out to reduce idle time and maximize utilization. By the same logic we should be making our homes ultrashort WeWork spaces while we travel or go to work. Cars are somewhat like an extension of our home. For some it’s a highly private space. If this analogy is true then they will never be rented like ultrashort cabs.

[pjc50]

So the interesting thing that happened with AirBnB is not that people started renting out fractions of their home in large numbers, but the average house price went up so much that people simply cannot afford to have "spare" space.

I suspect the plan with cars is similar: subscription-only or on-demand vehicles.

[fragmede]

Turo? GetAround?

[Ekaros]

And lot of people buy car to get utility at short notice. I don't think many people would like if their car was with empty battery at very end of what ever max range they set. And they were in hurry to get somewhere...

[DilettanteQuant]

People literally do this, it's called Airbnb. I don't understand, this is supposed to be a tech news site and you guys are acting like you haven't heard of any of these massively successful peer 2 peer companies.

It seems that you don't like Tesla for other reasons, so you're bringing up easily dismissed business challenges that have already been solved.

[WA]

Last time I went to an Airbnb that was actually the home of someone else was in 2016 or so. I assume most Airbnbs are apartments made explicitly for using them as Airbnb rentals. Same logic applies to Robo taxis. This won't happen. The "private space" argument is quite strong imho.

[nolok]

Airbnb has long since turned into commercial renting. People short renting their actual home when they're not there is now a minimal part of their activity.

[mkipper]

The difference is scale.

Airbnb isn't trying to revolutionize home ownership. They can have a successful business even if 99% of homeowners have no interest in renting out their place to strangers.

But when Musk talks about robotaxi, he doesn't describe it as a feature that some small percentage of Tesla owner will take advantage of and that Tesla will use to pull in some extra revenue. Instead, it's used as a justification to treat Tesla as a tech company rather than a car company, since robotaxi is going to completely change how society looks at transportation.

Even if Tesla successfully delivers robotaxi (a hard task in itself), there's no reason to assume it's going to cause the seismic shift that Musk seems to assume it will.