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Nearly One-third of Consumers Would Give Up Their Car Before Their Smartphone (computerworld.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the can't-play-angry-birds-on-your-car dept.

Lucas123 writes: A survey of 1,200 general consumers in four major countries by global tech design firm Frog found that 30% of respondents would give up their car before their smartphone. The online survey, which included the U.S., China, Denmark, and Germany, found that 37% of car owners would like to give up their car outright or felt they could get by without it by using an alternative form of transportation. "I think the people of my generation saw driving a vehicle as a rite of passage to adulthood. That was your freedom. I think the generation now views going from point A to point B as just occupying time that they could be doing something else," said Andrew Poliak of QNX Software Systems. At the same time, another survey revealed that even engineers continue to be wary of fully autonomous vehicles, including their vulnerability to hacks and exploits. The survey of IEEE members found they are not comfortable having autonomous vehicles pick up/drop off their children.

24 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Apple is leaving money on the table here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Smartphones are severely underpriced...

    1. Re: Apple is leaving money on the table here by afc_wimbledon · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not really. $600-$800 phone every 2 years plus the contract which can easily cost you $800-$1200 a year. You can afford to buy a cheap used car if you cancelled your phone for a few years.

      Comparing a new premium phone with a cheap used car is like comparing apples with.... oh, wait!

  2. Makes complete sense - with Uber/Lyft by rsborg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...they can get a ride just with their smartphone.

    Plus they can always bum a ride off their friends (oh, lets be honest, more likely their parents - more and more 18+ live with their parents due to insane rents and general inflation combined with a poor job market).

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
  3. The freedom of not having a car by ruir · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Driving is not only wasting time, but squandering money. If you live in a area well served with affordable public transportation, you save thousands by the year. And actually is one less shackle enslaving you. If you can afford to at least go without a car until you have children, you will save thousands. Depending on the country, the kind of car you drive, the downpayment, the maintenance and the depreciation, the taxes, a car might translate very well into an expense of 300-1,000 Euros per month.

    1. Re:The freedom of not having a car by ruir · · Score: 2

      forgot to mention taxes (which are there, and parking in city areas)

    2. Re:The freedom of not having a car by Jiro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Using a car isn't wasting time; using public transportation is wasting time. The public transportation goes from a specific location to another specific location (so it takes time to walk to and from those locations), and costs even more time when you transfer or wait for the next bus or train. It also might not go in a straight line and probably stops at many places along the way which you would not do in a car.

      Also, even places with otherwise good public transportation tend to only cover almost all of the times when you'd need it. Covering *all* of the times when you'd need it means having the public transportation run routes at times and places when the ridership is very low; governments hate doing this because it's a money sink, so you still need a car for that last 5% or 10% of the uses.

    3. Re:The freedom of not having a car by Noble713 · · Score: 2

      Driving is not only wasting time, but squandering money.

      *Commuting* is a waste of time....driving, for many people, is a passionate hobby.

      When I get tired of surfing the 'Net late at night, I go driving. The roads are fairly open since there's no dull worker-drones commuting, allowing you to go for a relaxing cruise, hit some twisties on the hills, or shred your tires drifting (although the noise from the latter tends to attract police attention).

      I suspect the bulk of the respondents simply have no idea and no experience with how to actually enjoy an automobile.

    4. Re:The freedom of not having a car by RogueyWon · · Score: 2

      Entirely depends on location. I live in an outer London suburb and can be at my workplace by train in 50 minutes door to door. That's a 20 minute train journey (factoring in a couple of minutes wait-time on the platform), plus 15 minutes walk at either end. The equivalent car journey, which I've done a handful of times (though I don't currently own a car) is around 110 minutes in the morning peak, given London congestion and the need to walk from the nearest (expensive) public car parking to my office.

      I've had a handful of occasions over the last 5 years, usually when needing either to make a very-early-morning (pre-5AM) journey or buying a large electrical item, that I've needed a car. That's what taxi and car-hire firms are for.

      With London property prices, owning a car is a daft move unless you absolutely need to (for family reasons or due to a disability). I wouldn't have been able to afford the deposit/mortgage for my current place on the salary I was on at the time if I had owned a car and been paying all the costs associated with it (plus I had the benefit of managing to buy during a brief dip in the market). Most other European cities are not quite so extreme as London (I gather Tokyo is the same, though), but most of the big ones are moving the same direction.

    5. Re:The freedom of not having a car by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Where I've tried both public transport and driving, I found that public transport took more time in most cases. And this is in the west of the Netherlands, where public transport is finely meshed, and roads are rather congested. Sure, I can read on the train (if I manage to find a seat), but time in a car isn't completely lost; I listen to the news or to new music I picked up. And in the end I prefer to save the 30-45 minutes each day on travel time even if it means paying through the nose for a car (€1.60/l for gas, and 21% VAT + a special tax on new cars; for larger cars the tax can exceed the factory price).

      There's a psychological angle to it as well. When I leave the office and get in my car, I feel like the work day is done. But if I leave and get on the train, it somehow feels like I am still on the clock until I get to my front door. Silly, but there it is.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    6. Re:The freedom of not having a car by Viol8 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Public transport goes almost everywhere I need,"

      Then you obviously don't need to go anywhere outside of the city or somewhere that isn't served by national rail. I also live in London and I'd be fecked without my car because I have friends and relatives who live in small towns up north which by car takes 2 hours and by public transport would take literally half a day. And then theres just having days out in the car with the baby. Good luck doing that on a train or bus and retaining your sanity.

    7. Re:The freedom of not having a car by operagost · · Score: 2

      Watching TV and doing crosswords is pretty much wasting time. You wouldn't get up early in the morning to do them.

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    8. Re:The freedom of not having a car by silentcoder · · Score: 2

      The US had some of the most expansive, affordable and efficient public transport in the world until not that long ago, it was known as the tram system (or in the American parlance: the streetcar companies). So much so that they represented a serious problem to profit growth for car companies.

      The car companies dealt with it by actually buying the streetcar companies out one by one, just so they could liquidate them, shut them down and destroy that public transport infrastructure to force commuters to buy cars.

      It was called "The redcar conspiracy" and it was pretty major news when it happened, congressional hearings and everything.

      Americans frequently cite lack of good public transportation as the reason they need cars. Fair enough. But don't blame population density or any other factors for this lack. That lack is not because of any significant difficulty in providing the service - that lack exists because the car companies created it (at significant expense) to get rid of competition they could surely not defeat.
      If there is any lesson in America's "everybody needs a car" situation it's the critical importance of having public transport be publicly OWNED. You can't buy out, liquidate and destroy a publicly owned utility.

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
    9. Re:The freedom of not having a car by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      I have no explanation as to why NY is as popular as it seems to be.

      I can give you two possible reasons: 1) it's just about the only place in the US where public transit works really well (as long as you stay in Manhattan), and 2) there's a LOT of single women there, and they aren't fat.

      There's also countless places to eat and a lot to do generally, both inside and outside the city, all without needing a car. AFAICT, it's really unique that way in the US.

  4. I can still communicate in the car. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Id ditch the phone, the car is my freedom plus I have UHF and VHF radio in the car for communication. Unlike phones you can use a radio while you drive where I am (Australia).

  5. cellphones vs guns? by ljw1004 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While we're on the subject of unrealistic counterfactuals... If each American had to choose between keeping their cellphone or their gun, how many would choose which?

    1. Re:cellphones vs guns? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      With a gun I can get a lot of phones, so this one is easy.

    2. Re:cellphones vs guns? by dunkelfalke · · Score: 2

      Honestly, I understand the part of wanting a firearm - target shooting is fun (well, used to be fun for me, then it got boring so I sold mine) but actually needing one - that must be a pretty fucked up location.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  6. What is the dependence on geography? by larryjoe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think it would be interesting to see the breakdown of survey results by country and region. If I live in the New York City area, I could see potentially going without a car due to viable alternative transportation options. If I live in Silicon Valley and already drive a car to work, it would be completely unacceptable to not have a car, as that would increase weekly travel times by 10-15 hours, i.e., an order of magnitude more travel time and several orders of magnitude more frustration. I imagine that Denmark and Germany and probably even China skew the numbers toward the New York City type of response.

    It would probably also be interesting to see the breakdown by age. I'm older in age and always choose to use a larger screen whenever possible. It would slightly bother me to give up my smartphone, but it would be unacceptable to me to lose my PC. The viewing and GUI interaction experience with a PC is way better and having to use a smartphone as my sole access to the web would make me go crazy.

  7. Consumers by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 2

    Fuck you, I'm a customer not a consumer. And no shit, its called public transit and living somewhere walkable.

  8. Seems biased... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sounds like something city folk would say.

  9. Oh hai, public transit good and self driving cars by mdkathon · · Score: 2

    I want to post on slasdot about the idea Of giving up personal vehicles. Though please understand that self driving cars will be hacked to kill everyone. Wtf.

  10. Authoritarian Goo Goo Ga Ga Recipe by TheRealHocusLocus · · Score: 2

    TA is one of those gee-whiz ain't the world chaingin' golly gee wow. I think this article is also a great authoritarian training exercise to help condition people to the thought of centrally imposed austerity measures. Take two things most people use, each of which they carry a range of opinion from indispensable to frivolous --- depending on their own unique circumstances --- but of course!

    Combine these people together in a bowl, and add a dash of confiscation trauma, and stir. Confiscation trauma is when someone wants to explore how people feel about specific things, but they feel that a good way to get people to 'open up' about their true feelings is to introduce the idea that one of them might be involuntarily (or forcibly) taken away.

    It can be as subtle as a choice of headline, where One third of people would opt for smartphone over car becomes Would Give Up Their Car Before Their Smartphone.

    To 'opt for' implies you may have one (or neither) and you are not in any position of adversity, simply evaluating them. To 'give up' changes the flavor completely. Now people are imagining unwelcome external forces influencing them. Things are being taken away. Some may imagine financial difficulties, others become outright paranoid. Both camps, have merit these days as take-home pay has stagnated and as special interest groups push their agendas through Congress. But an integral part of the game is that you imagine some adversary that is forcing you to make a choice.

    Now the rants and counter-rants begin, and the issue clouds because some of the people who seems to be favoring smartphones are actually just saying that their own lifestyle does not include driving. Today. At this moment. Some who argue in favor of cars are actually feeling threatened because --- well, let me cut to the quick here --- cars use evil fossil fuel and folks who consider automobile ownership and the personal freedom they provide to be a modern rite of passage, feel they are feeling 'encroached' by metropolitan and suburban attitudes, and it is not difficult to imagine some future where even rural people who need their own transportation are impacted by these attitudes.

    So because the headline has tapped into this Confiscation Anxiety, this discussion becomes inflamed by people stating the obvious in a way that is assertive enough to come off as threatening (if their views were politically persuasive). And there are rebuttals just as inflamed TA does not help resolve this or even seed the aruments, really. It's just about suburbia and In the end it's just a puff-piece exploring attitudes about driverless cars and how people feel about them.

    The way I see it, sooner or later we will all be slapped against the wall by the economy. If by some miracle it could be resolved by making this silly either-or choice... what will be experienced by must-have-cars-fuck-the-smartphones people like me would be an unwelcome choice:

    Someone is broke, and they're going to need a ride for the tenth time.
    1. Do I give you a ride?
    2. Do I give you $20 so you can use your fancy smartphone to call Uber?
    3. Do I suggest that you should find a new friend.

    See! I can play this austerity flame game too! ;-)

    --
    <blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
  11. Safe vs Sending you kids in them alone by Overzeetop · · Score: 2

    So, to be honest, there are a diminishingly small number of humans I would entrust to transport my small child. That's mainly because of the need to care for the child and the possible contingencies which occur when dealing with a child who is not able to negotiate all typical every day tasks, not necessarily the safety of the ride.

    Would I put my 4 or 5 year old in an autonomous vehicle? No.
    Would I accompany my 4 or 5 year old in an autonomous vehicle? Sure.

    Riding in an autonomous vehicle is, imho, akin to living without a firearm. There are, no doubt, edge cases where owning a fire arm might result in an increased survivability, but the dangers associated with them outweigh (or the necessary safety measures cancel out) the use cases.

    --
    Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
  12. Re:Romanticizing European public transportation by j2.718ff · · Score: 2

    Jokes on them, after living in Europe for an extended amount of time I can safely say that the American leftard romanticization of European public transportation and mobile phone service is complete crap. Buses here suck just as much as you'd expect in any major American city and cell coverage is even worse (at least it is cheap)! There is no way in hell I'd take a bus into work every day and for the first time ever I miss Verizon.

    Out of curiosity, what part of Europe are you talking about? I'm an American who spent a few years in Poland, and I would give almost anything to have the kind of cheap and reliable public transit I did while in Europe again.