A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Author:Adrian Hon [Hon, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: speculative; speculative fiction; speculative design; science fiction;, Hard Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780262539371
Google: hA38DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:36:05.693014+00:00

50    CHOOSING A DRIVING PLAN

United States, 2035

The driverless car revolutionized every aspect of transportation—particularly the business model. This brochure demonstrates how people struggled to come to grips with the new world:

Life used to be simple. If you wanted to travel, all you had to do was buy a car and put gas in it every so often. Sure, keeping a car was expensive, and it bled value every minute you weren’t using it, and you had to pay for parking and repairs and insurance, and you wasted thousands of hours of your life in the mindless drudgery of driving, but at least you knew you had absolutely no choice in the matter.

Well, it’s 2035 now, and while we’re blessedly free from the monotony and expense of driving, we’re also faced with a bewildering range of options for getting from A to B. The plummeting cost of cars (we can surely drop the term “driverless” by now), along with their tight network integration, has seen a thousand flowers bloom in the burgeoning “cars as a service” sector.

With so many choices available, it’s easy to get confused, but don’t worry: we’re here to help you find your perfect car plan!

Before we begin, those pay-as-you-go plans that seem so cheap with their free miles and entertainment? Unless you’re a penniless hermit who only makes ten trips a year or you hate the idea of being able to travel wherever you want, whenever you want—forget it.

Now we’ve gotten that out of the way, here are a few general tips on finding a good plan.

First off, don’t go for flat-rate pricing for car minutes or car miles. They might be easier to understand, but you get a lot less bang for your buck because you can’t take advantage of demand-based pricing. You’ll get ripped off if you use a car during low demand times—around 11 a.m., say—and during rush hour you’ll be left waiting because everyone else on your plan is trying to use cars at the same time. In theory, flat-rate car plans can be cheaper, but in practice they just don’t work out in the long term.

So that leaves demand-based pricing, with Challenger and CarSnap being the two leading competitors.

Challenger has points and CarSnap has beats, but they both amount to the same thing: travel currency that changes in price depending on how busy the network and traffic is. This kind of demand-based pricing means the same journey might cost different amounts depending on the time of day or whether there’s a special occasion (such as a holiday or sports event) that’s causing a lot of traffic and pollution.

In most cities, demand-based pricing is regulated by local governments rather than companies themselves, so you don’t have to worry about getting fleeced. But if you’re anxious about costs, both services offer paid memberships that reduce demand-multipliers, a bit like buying insurance.

A common mistake that new users make is overestimating how many points/beats they’ll need and signing up for an expensive contract they can’t get out of.

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