Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 709 posts

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

#211

Post by darkwater »

blhack wrote: post #139
gitanovic wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is: why don't you take a train instead? I have never been to US, but whenever I hear about self driving cars I think: why don't people just use public transport if they don't want to drive?

It’s too much of a hassle to use public transportation. With your own car you can bring as much stuff as you want, stop where you want, leave when you want, go wherever you want at your destination, bring whoever you want, listen to what you want on the radio, stop where you want for side trips/tourist things along the way etc. Like for instance with my own car instead of a shared train, I can bring my golf clubs, my…

> With your own car you can bring as much stuff as you want, stop where you want, leave when you want, go wherever you want at your destination, bring whoever you want, listen to what you want on the radio, stop where you want for side trips/tourist things along the way etc.

Also, you can get blocked in a traffic jam when you don't want.

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

#212

Post by gspr »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #172
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…

You mean 250 hours a year, not a week. But 31 minutes commuting per day is super low, that's 15 minutes each way. I doubt that is really the average to be honest. Of course with the pandemic commuting is not a big time sink anymore but I wonder how permanent this will be.

Yeah. I usually think that Americans have an insane tolerance for commuting, but 31 minutes per day is nothing! 15 minutes door-to-door to work is pretty fantastic — so fantastic that I too doubt that it's the average in the US northeast.

Does this average perhaps count people who aren't working as having zero commute?

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

#213

Post by tonyedgecombe »

zx2391 wrote: post #154

VW ships 3M cars per year, let's say a car is used 1h per day. Given all cars are used in this subscription model, we look at $765M MRR, or almost $10B per year, which is already about 10% of their current revenue. Given that autonomous vehicles do not suck time out of the user's budget, they might even be used more. At 3h/day, we already at $30B yearly revenue - almost half of what they made in 2020. And software ha…

VW ships 3M cars per year

It's a lot more than that:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272050/worldwide-vehicle...

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

#214

Post by berkes »

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,…

I'm no expert on any of the selfdriving features (I still self-drive my 1984 Volkswagen with tlc) but from what I hear and see, Tesla is amongst the worst when it comes to selfdriving and e.g. Volvo or Volkwagen is way ahead.

Their marketing, however, is top notch, so whenever Tesla fails to deliver, people conclude that 'all selfdriving must be crap'.

Is there something called 'Law of inhibiting leadership'? In which an underperforming leader of a segment holds back the entire segment?

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

#215

Post by gspr »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #196
GekkePrutser wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a city having excellent public transport makes even more sense than cars :) And outside the city space isn't an issue.

Public transport is not the answer to everything. What if you want to visit your relatives outside the city/move some heavy things/...

For visiting outside the city, you temporarily rent a vehicle outside the city, where space isn't a problem.

For moving heavy things: come on, how big of an impact on city traffic is this really?

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

#216

Post by Silhouette »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137
mnahkies wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you're paying for ongoing access to a service with continuous improvements and a cost to the company to continue providing you Why wouldn’t this apply to an autonomous driving service?

Is there any public record anywhere of any auto manufacturer anywhere that is implementing or proposing to implement autonomous driving as a service? Isn't that almost an oxymoron?

If your self-driving system requires some centralised service to operate properly, it can hardly be fully autonomous under all conditions. How can it react immediately to an emergency situation if it's not running locally?

And if you're not talking about that but just ongoing development work and making updates available after the sale, there's nothing that means that has to be a mandatory service. Either the original version works properly or it doesn't (and in this case, if it doesn't, it shouldn't be allowed on the roads and the regulators should eat the vendors alive). Any subsequent updates that somehow improve the "quality" of the system could be made available at an extra charge, just like new products or new versions of software in a million other contexts, without any need for compulsory ongoing payments where the system stops working if the customer stops paying.

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

#217

Post by pappyo »

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…

You're not capturing all the expenses to car ownership:

Insurance Fuel/charging Excise tax Parking Maintenance Cleaning

And most importantly, the hassel to deal with the above.

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

#218

Post by gspr »

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'm sorry for your father. It's sad to see Musk fan the cultism in his followers :-(

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

#219

Post by sofixa »

jjav wrote: post #161
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical co-lo is only cheaper if your time is worthless (ditto for Linux-on-the-corporate-desktop, or anything else that’s nominatively gratis). My current SaaS gig runs in Azure (App Services and containers - no VMs nor “serverless”) and being completely free of the need to do sysadmin work is just so nice. When I was colocating my own rack about a decade ago there was always something that needed my attention, be…

> Physical co-lo is only cheaper if your time is worthless Physical colocation is nearly always cheaper than AWS for most use cases. Exceptions are when your usage is so tiny that it doesn't need even a single full-time server, and, when your usage is so erratic that provisioning for the spikes doesn't make sense. For everyone else, you're paying a very large premium for AWS over what it'd cost to buy and operate som…

Or when you need anything more than to run a few very basic services ( like a PHP app with apache and mysql).

AWS have managed services for a lot of different things, which save a lot of time on maintenance. Object storage? Message queue? Any type of database? ML? etc. etc. etc.

And of course, there's the scalability. With on-prem it's a careful balancing act of buying enough capacity to have space to expand but not too much to waste it, and you have to regularly keep an eye out lest you hit a limit with multi-week lead times ( e.g. you're out of storage, and buying a new shelf can take weeks to be usable).

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

#220

Post by Mashimo »

echelon wrote: post #39
sabjut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's just not the resource efficient way going forward. Maybe in the future people will laugh at the idea of buying 2 tons of steel to sit around doing nothing for 95% of it's lifetime.

I already hate not being able to repair my phone, own my music/movies, etc. I own my home so that I can do what I want with it, and I own my car so that I can take it off road, leave my stuff in it, and work on it. Rental services are bland as fuck. I can organize my music and movies way better than Spotify and Netflix so that it meets my exact preferences. No. I don't want to live in the rental economy future, and I…

I own my home, it's an economic logical choice. Just like you I also have my music and movies as "real files" and not in the cloud.

But renting a car that would show up at my door and can drive it self back? Man, that would be cool. Would just need it a few time per year.

Post reply on HN