Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

241–250 of 709 posts

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

#241
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AWS isn't a scam on companies too poor to buy servers. It often is, for small and medium business (traditional ones) it's often cheaper to rent DC-Space and buy some servers yourself...but hey if you pay and don't do the math, that's your problem.

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…

That why i wrote "medium business (traditional ones)", the HW stuff can be done by the DC peoples, one HD as spare (online) and one offline, if HD fault, send email "please exchange HD 5". If you can safe 20k a year it's even probably worth your time...well 60 minutes of it...but maybe not if your one of those rock-star programmers ;)

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

#242
post #125
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's called Volkswagen for a reason too ;)

The name is from the other era ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1932%E2%80%931938:_...

The Name "Germany" is from a much different era too ;)

>The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany#Etymology

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

#243
post #237

> 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…

> The average person in the northeast spends 31 minutes commuting per day [2], for simplicity that's 0.5 hours,* 2 commutes a day, * 5 days a week, * 50 weeks a year (assuming 2 weeks vacation), is 250 hours commuting a week. You already said it's 31 minutes of commuting per day , so why are you doubling it in your subsequent calculation?

Did you go to the source? It’s 31 minutes commuting to work, most people, I believe, tend to commute back from work too. It could have been more clear, but it’s hardly difficult to understand.

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

#244
post #219
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Look, i never said aws good/bad, i just said do the math and don't trow your money blindly at some IaaS/PaaS/SaaS etc.

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

#245
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…

This must be just the Volkswagen brand, the whole companz delivered a lot more: "The Volkswagen Group delivered 9.3 million vehicles to customers worldwide in fiscal year 2020 (2019: 11.0 million)."

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/group/portrait-and-productio...

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

#246

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…

Reminds me of "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow

https://craphound.com/unauthorized-bread/

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

#247

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…

calling a software driven car Bug is probably not the best idea !

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

#250

> 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 could be wrong and he could be wrong.

Every company will try to extract money from their customers and market normally decides who is correct.

I see cost optimalisation for some people and none for most.

Post reply on HN