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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

#251

Post by alexanderchr »

gambiting wrote: post #124
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's the same argument that BMW made, and it's just as faulty here. They said that 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 - isn't that great??? I hate this argument with a burning passion though, it's turning ownership into subscription only to extr…

But the fact that you paid for the heated seats upfront increases the value of the car when you resell it. Likely by more than what you saved by renting?

…or maybe that was your point?

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

#252

Post by __s »

jacquesm wrote: post #197
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #164

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…

If this is familiar to you then you're right, it's a riff on Philip K Dick's 'Ubik'. Brilliant book. Thank you.

http://sickmyduck.narod.ru/dick25-0.html search for "doorhandle"

Also amusing is the normalization: "Free!" He stared at her. "That's not economically feasible. How can it operate on that basis? For more than a month?"

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

#253

Post by hef19898 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #210
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> For someone who only occasionally needs heated seats, this is value adding. No, for someone who only has a 3 year lease on a BMW, this may be value adding (or value subtracting). The money you save by not paying for heated seats when you buy the BMW does not go into your pocket when you sell the BMW without heated seats, as whoever buys the BMW from you will pay less for a BMW in which heated seats are free than on…

As most new cars are leased, at least Europe for premium brands, anyway, I think that won't be an issue. BMW will sell your on, not you.

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

#255

Post by PeterisP »

rsj_hn wrote: post #210
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> For someone who only occasionally needs heated seats, this is value adding. No, for someone who only has a 3 year lease on a BMW, this may be value adding (or value subtracting). The money you save by not paying for heated seats when you buy the BMW does not go into your pocket when you sell the BMW without heated seats, as whoever buys the BMW from you will pay less for a BMW in which heated seats are free than on…

On the other hand, the fact that you paid for the heated seats does not necessarily mean that the next owner won't need to pay for them - the manufacturer can tie that subscription and 'unlocked features' to the owner; I seem to recall reading an article here on HN some months ago about some resold car which got the "unlockable extras" disabled for the new owner.

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

#256

Post by datameta »

t0mas88 wrote: post #198
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…

It's more nuanced to me then "the hardware is there". Because by that reasoning you should be able to take any empty airline seat for $ 5 since the flight is already going and will only use 0.00something extra fuel with you in the seat. And yet airline pricing is a big data science project at each of them. If VW spends 700 million on making self driving they want to get more then that back. They can do so by charging…

The difference is that you own the vehicle and everything in it. Whereas in taking a flight you pay for roughly the combined value of limited seating, plus service by the flight and ground crews, plus fuel expended by the plane.

Therein lies the rub.

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

#257

Post by turminal »

berkes wrote: post #206
turminal wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Are you saying that if I did the math, I'd move my company to a more expensive heroku (I did), onto another, cheaper VPS provider (I did, Linode, DO, rackspace even, for other companies) or onto self hosted&maintained hardware (this hasn't been cost effective for me for decades)?

There's a point between being too small to use up a single beefy server and being big enough to go cloud scale, where colocating a few servers and maintaining them makes sense financially in most scenarios. For companies smaller than that renting a cheaper VPS probably makes more sense.

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

#258

Post by anastalaz »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #167
Mashimo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be decent for people who only want to use autonomous driving on occasion, not with every commute. Keep in mind this is a German taking to a German magazine, US business model might be different (But probably not)

Yeah, I don’t own a car, but I easily could. 7 euros per hour is cheaper than any car I could rent for a few hours, and cheaper than almost any ride share option. The only place I’ve been where calling a ride share would maybe be cheaper is Pakistan.

You would still have to buy the car. The 7 euros is just for using the autopilot feature.

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

#259

Post by gambiting »

alexanderchr wrote: post #251
gambiting wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same argument that BMW made, and it's just as faulty here. They said that 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 - isn't that great??? I hate this argument with a burning passion though, it's turning ownership into subscription only to extr…

But the fact that you paid for the heated seats upfront increases the value of the car when you resell it. Likely by more than what you saved by renting? …or maybe that was your point?

Indeed. BMW's argument to this is that all cars will have all equipment built in - it will all be unlockable by subscription. Want adaptive cruise control? $200 a year. Heated seats? $100 a year. Sport modes for the engine/transmission? $400 a year. etc etc etc.

It annoys me to no end because it means you are paying(in the cost of the car) to have all of this advanced tech in the car, but you can't use it without subscription. What if I get a modder to enable it anyway? Am I now a criminal? What about the environmental impact of lugging around hardware that you don't want or need, just in case you or the next owner wants it?

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

#260

Post by xaduha »

Always felt like autonomous driving without smart roads isn't going to happen on a large scale, just computer vision isn't enough.

What would a smart road be? Either some infrastructure that is designed for this or a digital overlay attached to it that every car nearby continuously updates in real time. Or maybe both.

That would mean an open standard and shared access to such an overlay, plus technology for that would have to be mandatory for new cars regardless of whether they plan to be autonomous or not. Right now it's just a capitalist rat race that no one is winning.

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