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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

#301

Post by bsenftner »

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)?

If you're any form of hi-compute, the cloud is insanely expensive and a no-brainer for colocation, even for as little as one server. If your service requires more than the average CRUD serving of media, the cloud quickly becomes far far too expensive.

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

#302

Post by iso1210 »

andylynch wrote: post #238
erhk wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already happening with property ownership being coagulated in cities. How is this a surprise

Good point. Here in the UK the big developers seem to be getting more and more creative in generating post-sale revenues, be it from escalating ground rents, property management fees, captive ISPs, or £3 towel rentals for the sky pool.

That's only a problem because people buying them don't factor those costs into the equation. Effectively the company is arbitraging based on laziness of the general consumer to do the calculations

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

#303

Post by tnzm »

ovi256 wrote: post #121
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…

> I split time between at least two cities Please don't bring up minority use cases when discussing the average or modal use case.

Why? Does it threaten your sensibilities?

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

#304

Post by prennert »

smarx007 wrote: post #267

I think it is a great idea for bringing autonomous cars to the market. Think about it: take a VW that costs $25k today. Now, fast forward 10 years and you can buy roughly the same car for roughly the same price but with autonomy-as-a-service. First and foremost, it's still a car worth $25k. And if it's your first autonomous car, you will naturally be sceptical if it's worth it. Getting you to pay $10k extra may be a…

I agree. This allows you to switch on autonomous driving when driving to unfamiliar places, long distance, and for cases where you would make more than $8.50/hour by working while the car drives. Or just because you had a drink and want to be driven home in your own car.

I am sure many people would opt to not use it most of the time, but having the option is great. As long as not using the option does not make the car a worse car than an non-automomuous one.

I feel most negative comments are coming from the dark-pattern aspect of it. How transparent is the charge going to be, are people going to be trapped in bills (yearly subscription outlasting their actual car-ownership) they wont be able to afford?

I also think that if few people use the feature regularly, but all cars need to have the hardware to support the autonomous driving, everybody is going to essentially overpay for features they are not using. Because one way or another VW needs to break even on the hardware at least.

Therefore, I think it could be an amazing business model if the promises of SaaS are fulfilled, a product that constantly improves and that you only pay for when you use it. In this case the incentives of customers and VW are aligned.

I think what people are afraid of, are dark patterns, subscription bundles and general in-transparency make the car a lot more expensive than people bought into.

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

#305

Post by iso1210 »

mnahkies wrote: post #132
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…

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…

> A world where my car gets micro-transactions to turn on the AC or heaters etc scares me.

It's the HN community that have created this. If I have an EC2 VM, I have to pay Amazon a micro-transaction for every dns request they serve and every time I as much as ping my box

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

#306

Post by another_kel »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #72
speedgoose wrote: post #10

I would rather pay someone to hack my car so I don't have to pay per hour.

Market price is about $2200 https://comma.ai

It's 1100 (plus 200 for connector). Yesterday's price was a joke 'double the price sale'.

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

#308

Post by bsenftner »

qayxc wrote: post #262
mavhc wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies have 1 server

Iron is cheap nowadays. It's the upkeep that kills you. This "1 server" is equivalent to at least two part-time admins to ensure smooth operations. No biggie if said server just hosts a static website, big deal if runs mission critical processes. That's the part too many "self-hosting" advocates conveniently leave out. A correct TCO calculation must include this cost (and proper risk assessment) and only then can a c…

Maintaining a server is one of the big scary nothings that prevents many from learning the reality of how basic and elementary it actually is. Giving/having the process developers semi-knowledgeable about devOps helps significantly. But it is not hard, and not hard to learn from zero.

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

#309

Post by iso1210 »

sokoloff wrote: post #276
Nullabillity wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is a great example of how this model ends up awful for both drivers (who get awful working conditions and usually end up making a lot less net than promised) and customers (who get an awful experience, end up paying a lot more than they would otherwise, and still aren't making progress towards getting rid of that extra expense).

As a consumer, Uber has been a massive win for me. We own two “daily” drivers, but going downtown or to the airport in an Uber is convenient and cheaper than parking downtown or at the airport. On trips to other cities, Uber is often way cheaper than cabs. I’ve never found Uber worse than cabs and maybe 1 in a 100 Ubers is dirty or smelly, reminding me of how awful cabs used to be about half the time. Many drivers se…

Uber is certainly a win in almost all cities - I can count on one hand the times I've had an issue with them (once in Singapore, once in Kenya), and I've used uber far more than legacy cabs (where I can think of all manner of issues - probably 1 in 6 or 1 in 7 journeys)

Uber relies on the drivers underselling themselves though, which isn't good for society, but is great for the individual rider.

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

#310

Post by slver »

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…

> 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 a larger period of time.

Self-driving is going to be a service. It'll never be "done". Let's be very clear about this.

So what's actually is happening is Tesla charges you for something it can't give you yet, and something that will require ongoing maintenance i.e. you'd be paying a subscription in the long run again (just wait and see).

VW just starts with the right model from the get go and doesn't set you back $10K on empty promises.

Who is "completely disingenuous" here?

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