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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

#401

Post by judge2020 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #395

As an SW dev the first thing I experience at this is sadness, on a bad day I might feel my heart in my throat. I am proud when I maximize the value the customer gets for the cost it takes to give them that value. I'm skeptical about business plans that involve making value and then locking it away or (similarly) degrading value so you can some or all of it back to customers. A good example is the airline industry tha…

> I'm skeptical about business plans that involve making value and then locking it away or (similarly) degrading value so you can some or all of it back to customers

Surely it must be paid for though, right? The cost of autonomous driving isn’t the hardware - simply purchasing some cameras, a radar, and a ML GPU doesn’t mean the car can drive itself- it’s the software acting on inputs in a precise way to turn the wheel or brake in certain situations. You might be paying for the hardware in the initial purchase but your car would likely be thousands more expensive if they pro-rated the cost to build self driving into the MSRP.

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

#402

Post by squiggleblaz »

GuB-42 wrote: post #225
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…

Tesla charges $10k for not really self driving, with the promise that it will improve, and you should buy it now, because the price will increase in the future. I.e. they make you pay for something you don't have, with no guarantee that you will have it later. If it isn't a money grab, I don't know what is. And of course you can take a loan on that, so it isn't an upfront cost either. At least, with VW system, you pa…

> And of course it is to extract more money from consumers, that's the goal of every company.

No it isn't. We don't have companies so that they can extract money from consumers. We have companies to help efficiently distribute wealth through the community to maximise the probability of social needs being filled.

If the goal was to extract money from consumers and give it to those with spare capital, there are vastly more efficient ways to do that. Why would they even bother producing valuable goods?

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

#403

Post by ghaff »

gambiting wrote: post #351
andyzweb wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not bought but we rented a house where the owner padlocked 2 bedrooms shut and said if we wanted to use them it was an extra $200 a month to use them as home offices.

That's......beyond dumb. Like, if you don't pay him the extra $200, he's not extracting any extra value from these bedrooms. It's not like they can be rented to someone else in the meantime. So.....why do it in the first place?

A bit weird but there's at least an argument that there's some wear and tear associated with using the rooms and, presumably, the landlord thought that the slightly cheaper/smaller apartment--with a possible upsell--was more rentable.

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

#404

Post by fapjacks »

PaulHoule wrote: post #395

As an SW dev the first thing I experience at this is sadness, on a bad day I might feel my heart in my throat. I am proud when I maximize the value the customer gets for the cost it takes to give them that value. I'm skeptical about business plans that involve making value and then locking it away or (similarly) degrading value so you can some or all of it back to customers. A good example is the airline industry tha…

If I buy hardware, it's mine, and I'll figure out a way to take ownership of the hardware I've been sold. One way or another, every artificial limitation shimmed into in every piece of hardware goes down in flames.

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

#405

Post by PaulHoule »

I see two angles on this.

1. A self-driving car will need lots of experience to get good. The way to get this experience is to get it to drive as many miles as possible, thus you want to make the marginal cost zero.

2. A self-driving car needs software maintenance and possibly remote control. It needs a recurring revenue stream to pay for the first and should pay-as-you-go for the second.

Technical factors apply.

At least in the US I think any kind of cellular-based V2X communication is a pipe dream. Carriers love the idea that you'd have another expensive subscription for your car, but they aren't interested in the investment to get sufficient network coverage. (E.g. how much more has Verizon spent touting the millimeter waver 'hotspots' that have in a few cities than on actually building them out?)

Carmakers could probably afford to front you $2000 worth of hardware (video-based self-driving system) but it's unimaginable that they could afford to put a LIDAR in (costs as much the engine) and expect to get paid for it in dribs and drabs.

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

#407

Post by nico_h »

judge2020 wrote: post #401
PaulHoule wrote: post #395

As an SW dev the first thing I experience at this is sadness, on a bad day I might feel my heart in my throat. I am proud when I maximize the value the customer gets for the cost it takes to give them that value. I'm skeptical about business plans that involve making value and then locking it away or (similarly) degrading value so you can some or all of it back to customers. A good example is the airline industry tha…

> I'm skeptical about business plans that involve making value and then locking it away or (similarly) degrading value so you can some or all of it back to customers Surely it must be paid for though, right? The cost of autonomous driving isn’t the hardware - simply purchasing some cameras, a radar, and a ML GPU doesn’t mean the car can drive itself- it’s the software acting on inputs in a precise way to turn the whe…

How do you figure that one? Any company sell a lot of cars, would it really be thousands more ? How big would the dev & Q/A team need to be for this to accumulate to thousands more?

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

#408

Post by nico_h »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #402
GuB-42 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla charges $10k for not really self driving, with the promise that it will improve, and you should buy it now, because the price will increase in the future. I.e. they make you pay for something you don't have, with no guarantee that you will have it later. If it isn't a money grab, I don't know what is. And of course you can take a loan on that, so it isn't an upfront cost either. At least, with VW system, you pa…

> And of course it is to extract more money from consumers, that's the goal of every company. No it isn't. We don't have companies so that they can extract money from consumers. We have companies to help efficiently distribute wealth through the community to maximise the probability of social needs being filled. If the goal was to extract money from consumers and give it to those with spare capital, there are vastly…

It's the only legal way.

Have you had a look at the healthcare industry in the US vs healthcare in the rest of the world?

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

#409

Post by ryathal »

bluGill wrote: post #327
iso1210 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It won't be long after self driving arrives and you won't get that option. Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases. Once self driving is better survival than humans it won't be legal to drive on public roads.

Maybe on restricted access highways, but self driving isn't coming to dirt and gravel roads any time soon.

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

#410

Post by ars »

bluGill wrote: post #327
iso1210 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It won't be long after self driving arrives and you won't get that option. Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases. Once self driving is better survival than humans it won't be legal to drive on public roads.

> Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases.

Humans drive correctly 99.99999% of the time. We can't can't even keep a computer up and running that well, never mind driving perfectly.

See this thread with the math: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166

The future you are expecting is never going to happen.

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