191–200 of 709 posts
It also - funny - is higher than the minimum wage in many places.
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If you leave the self driving aside, the model s is an amazing car. Compared with a high end bmw/merc/audi you get more features as standard - though I do admit the finish/build quality on those cars is superior. I have a 4 year old MS, and genuinely like it and love the acceleration/nimbleness and have experienced very few issues. I'd consider tesla again for my next car, but FSD would not be a factor either way.
I don’t buy on features myself because quite frankly every damn car I’ve hired or bought which has anything other than basic features is chock full of bugs and has to be fixed every two minutes. Auto companies just can’t and shouldn’t write any high level software at all and low level embedded stuff is even pretty awful. They just can’t support it properly. Tesla are a notable exception to this as in they actually of…
I also bet on simplicity, both because it's much cheaper, and because it gives me less trouble. Fuses, switches and relays, as you say.
I simply don't trust a company who already has my money to maintain a software package on wheels, and I just don't trust software in general.
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> This is 100% a way to extract more money from consumers, especially non financially stable consumers, while lying to all of our faces Isn't this hyperbolic? I split time between at least two cities. Being able to pay as I go represents a real saving in cost, time and attention. Sometimes buying is better than renting. But sometimes there are economies of centralization. AWS isn't a scam on companies too poor to buy…
>AWS isn't a scam on companies too poor to buy servers. Do the math and see how using AWS just doesn't make sense at the scale most companies operate.
For companies and business travelers, this is perfect. Let me elaborate: If you purchase an asset, that is seen as a store of value so you need to spread out the tax reductions over the useful life of the product. But like this, self-driving is taxed as a service, not as an asset. That means all expenses are immediately fully deductible. Also, that means you can buy an affordable used car, gain full tax benefits (bec…
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>How is autonomous driving an increasingly scarce resource? Space is the scarce resource. In a city that's full of 90% of the time parked cars it doesn't really make sense for everyone to have their own car. Autonomous driving just combines the best of Uber and car sharing.
In a city having excellent public transport makes even more sense than cars :) And outside the city space isn't an issue.
The car refused to drive autonomously. It said, “$8.50, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the car. Again he tried the self-driving knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the car said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this VW…
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> instead of paying $500 upfront for heated seats, they will be available as an annual unlock for say $100/year. Since they know an average owner keeps a new BMW for only 3 years, this is a saving for new buyers For someone who only occasionally needs heated seats, this is value adding. I agree that forcing everyone into a subscription is coercive. But there are a lot of people for whom the flexibility of a subscript…
With a SASS product you're paying for ongoing access to a service with continuous improvements and a cost to the company to continue providing you. With heated seats the hardware to provide the functionality was either fitted or not, once it leaves the factory it's static and so it seems pretty unreasonable to me to charge an ongoing fee for the privilege. A world where my car gets micro-transactions to turn on the A…
If VW spends 700 million on making self driving they want to get more then that back. They can do so by charging everyone 10k more for the car, but it would make the car expensive and decrease sales volume requiring an even higher price. Or they can come up with some other model where users with less budget pay less while those that can afford it pay more. In that case you need to make it so that those that pay more get more benefits, and their idea for that is charging by hours of usage.
I'm not sure I'm happy with that as a customer, but the model isn't crazy.
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Easier solved than with a real driver, just flip a switch and transfer control to another drone pilot. Solves more issues: boring long trip, flip drivers every 30 minutes. One moment you're driving a car in texas, next moment you're driving a car in new york, and 30 minutes later you're driving the Hana Highway on Maui.
With no consequence to you if you decide to go GTA on the system, no peripheral vision, no feel of the road or wheel, assuming you at least have stereoscopic vision with a headset it’s still not at all going to work for white out or hard rain. It’s a fun idea that we can create a whole generation of Bangladeshi click farmers that drive people instead… but it’s a nonstarter for a bunch of reasons.
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…
In Finland, it's popular to take your car in a train from Helsinki or Turku in the south to Rovaniemi in the north overnight. There are also cargo trains that carry trucks from the coastal harbours to inland railway stations.