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

arstechnica.com

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

#331

Post by dmitriid »

iso1210 wrote: post #298
dmitriid wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least, with VW system, you pay when you use it. Doesn't work in your area, you don't pay. "AWS has billed us tens of thousands of dollars because we forgot to turn something off/confusing billing" hasn't taught anyone anything? There's nothing honest about VW's approach. They won't have self-driving either, it will be at best the same as Tesla's. And yet, they want to charge you, and charge you significantly mor…

That's the same argument against software-as-a-service Maybe I'm not bothered about self driving for 90% of my journeys, but on occasion I'm going somewhere unusual or want to travel overnight or after drinking or whatever I'll just pay for a few hours. Imagine a world where there was just a set fee of $x per hour and $x per mile to travel. Would allow a far easier choice between different modes of transport, as the…

And then you forget to click a "don't use autopilot" setting buried in three levels of settings, and will pay for a month-worth of driving.

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

#333

Post by monkeybutton »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #324

My initial reaction to the headline was something along the lines of “ugh, this is awful, I can never own anything anymore.” Then I thought about it some more. I would be 100% okay with this if Volkswagon is taking responsibility for damage caused by accidents. It makes sense that way, because every additional hour on the road adds additional risk for VW. Whereas if I owned the self-driving software (as part of the c…

Autonomous driving is a safety feature and we've noticed you have enabled manual control. Please hold while we notify your insurance provider so your premiums can be adjusted.

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

#334

Post by chii »

imtringued wrote: post #266
agilob wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates says people shouldn't own land, should always rent. That another company from US (forgot name) that buys houses for 50% higher asking price, now this. These days we rent books, games, flats, soon we'll rent homes and cars. No need to own anything when you can pay more money to rent it.

>Bill Gates says people shouldn't own land, should always rent. Private ownership of land doesn't work because land value goes up even with no input of the land owner. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Everybod... You are free to own the house and car.

> land value goes up even with no input of the land owner.

but this happens to other rare objects as well (value goes up without input from the owners), why is land so targeted?

My take is that _everything_ should be ownable, and owned. For example, if someone owned the air you breath, then you would have to pay to breath it. But it would also give incentive for this owner to stop pollution of the air - after all, you would not pay to breath polluted air! So the problem of air pollution is solvable this way.

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

#335

Post by ghaff »

lonelyasacloud wrote: post #295
estaseuropano wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would buy this argument if they sold the initial car at a loss - but they don't do that. You paid for that feature when you bought the car, then you pay again to use it. This is just rent seeking.

> You paid for that feature when you bought the car, then you pay again to use it. Short answer. No, not really; a manufacturer can't simply lump the price of all the unused stuff onto the base price. It would hand the low end to their competitors. Longer answer. Assuming that the manufacturers are not operating as a cartel (which is a different discussion), a manufacturer simply adding the total cost of all non-acti…

In fact, you can see how this plays out in the computer market.

While binning goes on with desktop and commodity server processors, by and large manufacturers can't play too many games with building in unused capacity.

However, at the high-end, especially mainframes, you absolutely have features like capacity on demand and pricing by workload and there was even more of this sort of thing in the past.

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

#336

Post by mft_ »

Rygian wrote: post #208
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,…

What did you test-drive? Regular Tesla auto-pilot, or the limited-access FSD Beta? They are radically different experiences.

This is important.

From the original description, my suspicion is it’s the regular (i.e. not advanced beta) “full self driving“ package, which I have on my model 3.

Truth is, it’s pretty limited, and you’ve got to learn the types of situations where it will and won’t cope. Through town, situations with parked cars, or weird lane markings, it will struggle.

However, the flipside is that on longer journeys – with mostly open roads, it does very well indeed. I recently did a three+ hour drive and the car drove for probably 80% of that time, and without any issues at all. Once you get used to its foibles and therefore understand when you can trust it, it really is a relaxing experience.

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

#338

Post by ghaff »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #127
ovi256 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> don't bring up minority use cases There are a lot of minority use cases with cars. I suspect there are more, in aggregate, minority uses than there are cases in the mode. In any event, there is a massive non-extortive beachhead for this model, as deminstrared by Uber and Zipcar et al .

For me, living in an ex-urban area, I'm entirely car dependent so these services don't really matter when I'm at home. But I know a couple who moved to SF and gave up their cars and their lifestyle clearly wouldn't be possible without Uber and Zipcar.

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

#339

Post by JohnWhigham »

globular-toast wrote: post #226
ryndbfsrw wrote: post #12

You will own nothing and love it

Ownership is overrated. It's not a universally good thing. In many cases it's a huge liability. The things you own end up owning you. Would you want to own the stretch of road outside your house? What benefit would you get from it? You'd now be responsible for maintaining it and presumably you'd take out an insurance policy in case of freak events damaging it. You'd pray for a mild winter and hope your neighbours don…

This is more about fighting the powers that be and them taking away the ability to own anything at a reasonable price, period. Great example is the WSJ story yesterday about asset managers and foreign investors snatching up every house on the market. Don't you want the ability to own something if you feel the desire to do so, or would you rather corporations buy it from out under you/rent it back to you and there be no other option?

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

#340

Post by WJW »

owl57 wrote: post #291
qayxc wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And, if instead of a dedicated server you rent some combination of AWS services, you suddenly don't need admin or need a cheaper one?

You don't exactly need to be an expert in object storage to stick a file into S3 and download it again some time later, just as 99% of SQL queries don't need a full blown DBA to write efficiently. (In fact, most queries are so simple that most shops have automated them with ORMs and the like)

It is always the 1% of difficult stuff that hits you, but it is very rarely the correct call to optimize for that 1% instead of for the 99% of uses.

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