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What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

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Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#91

Post by ec109685 »

hughrr wrote: post #89
tempestn wrote: post #49

Having finally had a chance to test-"drive" an advanced autopilot Tesla last weekend, I can confidently say at the current level of that tech I would pay less than nothing. At best (cruising down a well-marked highway) it was only slightly worse than useless, taking a different line in the lane than I considered optimal, leaving me feeling a background level of apprehension. From there it ranged through frustrating,…

So much this. I hope I don't stand on too many toes here. Actually I don't care. My father has a self driving enabled Tesla Model S which he paid a hell of a lot of money for that he doesn't have as he's in his 70s, living entirely off the remains of the house he just sold. He's convinced it'll be any day now that he gets full self driving and that it'll change the world. He tells me he loves the car and phones me da…

Obviously you know your father best, but it at least seems from your words it makes him happy.

As someone with similar car, you get to know it’s quirks and use it when it adds value.

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#92

Post by vidarh »

zbrozek wrote: post #73
_carbyau_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP but I feel that renting/subscribing everything doesn't feel very secure. I'd like to believe a "rentier" future will empower renters with even cheaper options due to efficiency of utility. As you say, having a big chunk of capability sit there most of the time is wasteful in a sense. However it also feels like it entrenches the rich with further options of rent-seeking. And it doesn't take much cynicism to thi…

If you look at tool rental, it's usually cheaper to buy the tool at somewhere between a few days and a week of rental time. I don't expect any efficiencies to end up with the renter. It's so bad that it was cheaper for me to buy a wide format printer than it was to pay a print shop for prints to submit to the planning department.

I suspect that is largely to do with frequency of use.

To me it'd be worth a premium to not have to buy, store and dispose of something I know I'd rarely use, to the point that for some things I might well be fine with paying full purchase price if I can just avoid the hassle.

Renting in those instances would be more about avoiding annoyances than saving money.

At the same time I'd assume the amount of time specialized tools lay idle but lock up capital and storage space for providers of rented capacity means you need to recoup a lot of cost per rental event.

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#93

Post by midasuni »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #24

I just wish we would bring back car trains. I like driving. I want to drive. There are some incredible roads in the places I go to, and I want to drive on them. However, I don’t care much for the long motorway drives through Europe that I need to do to take me to the interesting places. I want to drive my car on to a train in Kraków, hang out in the restaurant for several hours, and then drive off the train in Gdańsk…

They run in several countries, but fundamentally they are very expensive (far more than $10 an hour)

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#94

Post by hughrr »

ec109685 wrote: post #91
hughrr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I hope I don't stand on too many toes here. Actually I don't care. My father has a self driving enabled Tesla Model S which he paid a hell of a lot of money for that he doesn't have as he's in his 70s, living entirely off the remains of the house he just sold. He's convinced it'll be any day now that he gets full self driving and that it'll change the world. He tells me he loves the car and phones me da…

Obviously you know your father best, but it at least seems from your words it makes him happy. As someone with similar car, you get to know it’s quirks and use it when it adds value.

It makes him tell everyone he's happy but that's where it ends. He's got too much pride to tell the truth.

And those aren't quirks; they are big stinking problems. Never write down a problem as something that isn't one. I owned a Merc 190E once that was a bag of problems. My life got better and I got happier the day I acknowledged them and got rid of it.

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#96

Post by VintageCool »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #34
miketery wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The density doesn’t make sense. Imagine all the congestion on highways, instead you are on a rail road line.

My understanding was that congestion on highways is mostly caused by bad drivers. A train isn’t affected by people randomly braking or weaving around different lanes because they lack driving skill. A train also isn’t as affected by inclement weather.

Cars are also tremendously space inefficient. The Tesla Model 3 is nearly as big (93.8 sq ft) as 3 Queen Size beds (33.3 sq ft).

There is the classic set of pictures showing how much space is needed to transport 60 people by bus, by bike, and by car.

https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...

On my (pre-covid) morning commute to the office, most of the cars crawling along the highway had one person in them. The slowness is the result of people trying to merge into the highway, not "bad drivers".

Another way to illustrate how much space cars take up is to look at suburban office parks. There will be a small building (usually 1 or 2 stories) surrounded and dwarfed by a parking lot.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2014/...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Liberty+Lake,+WA/@47.67315...

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#97

Post by m_mueller »

hyperhopper wrote: post #38
imposterr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, artificial artificial intelligence.

Ask yes, exploited human intelligence. Though also, at the same time the liability questions would quickly become... Complicated.... With that model

In the same way that basically the entire modern global economy is exploiting humans? Well it does, but it also gives something back: living together in a civilization that kinda works (so far). I think for a lot of people doing some mechanical turk style driving could actually be quite a satisfying job, more so than e.g. data entry tasks.

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#98

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

hughrr wrote: post #89
tempestn wrote: post #49

Having finally had a chance to test-"drive" an advanced autopilot Tesla last weekend, I can confidently say at the current level of that tech I would pay less than nothing. At best (cruising down a well-marked highway) it was only slightly worse than useless, taking a different line in the lane than I considered optimal, leaving me feeling a background level of apprehension. From there it ranged through frustrating,…

So much this. I hope I don't stand on too many toes here. Actually I don't care. My father has a self driving enabled Tesla Model S which he paid a hell of a lot of money for that he doesn't have as he's in his 70s, living entirely off the remains of the house he just sold. He's convinced it'll be any day now that he gets full self driving and that it'll change the world. He tells me he loves the car and phones me da…

I was working for a tier-1 supplier in Detroit when Tesla announced their first car that wasn’t the lotus body, a vp at a supplier laughed and said “they’re about to find out how hard it is to build cars”. This guy knew cars and every time I hear someone with negative feedback on Tesla’s I think about that.

I’ve heard more people describe it as “a computer with wheels” than I can remember.

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#99

Post by danuker »

hyperhopper wrote: post #62

> In a swipe at Tesla, he said that by charging hourly fees, VW would make autonomous driving more accessible than “a car with a five-digit surcharge.” This is completely disingenuous at best, and malicious at worst. This is a perfect example of the boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness [1]. This is just taking advantage of the poor-middle class' inability to pay a larger upfront cost, to extort them for more over…

> inability to pay a larger upfront cost, to extort them for more over a larger period of time.

I say, the more competition for banks, the better.

Re: What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

#100

Post by jillesvangurp »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #21

Sounds like a steal for perfect Level 5 autonomy. That’s about the price of hiring someone to drive you for close to minimum wage. But for advanced cruise control? Pass.

I heard a great characterization of autonomy levels that it is much less about technical capability and much more about legal liability. People obsess about the technology. The real challenge is going to be liability and insurance. That will flip around in a hurry when it becomes clear that human driving is a root cause for most remaining incidents and insurance cost. You'll be allowed to drive but you'll pay for the privilege through your insurance.

The difference between a level 2-3 and a level 5 car is the presence of a steering wheel and the legal requirement to have your hands on it. As incidents with Tesla show that need is both real but actually not that urgent given the fact that people get away with and are really creative in finding ways to not have their hands on the wheel. The occasional incidents because of that mean this is a problem but the lack of lots of incidents indicate that actually it's not completely horrible at what it does. Tesla is taking an incremental approach here and every incident makes the whole system a little safer. Their predictions as to when they will do level 5 and eventually 6 are of course wildly optimistic but the general approach is not without merit. They get lots of data and the improvements are basically data driven.

The middle ground here is level 4 where it becomes safe and legal to remove your hands from the wheel under some circumstances (like a road with special lanes, a well mapped and understood area, cars staying below certain speed limits, etc). Level 4 is basically what Waymo does in a very limited set of regions. Unlike Tesla, they actually have driver less cars though. Level 5 would be when they can do it anywhere. From 3 to 6 is basically a path of aggressively cutting down on the possibility for any kind of incident.

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