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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

#491

Post by ridethebike »

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…

I'm not sure what the problem is. Isn't extracting more money the point of basically every company?

Over the course of last 7 years living in NY I paid for rentals + uber + taxis way more than if I just bought a car in the beginning. Yet I'm going to buy a car anyway, it's simply too much hassle.

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

#492

Post by iso1210 »

kortex wrote: post #456
ashtonkem wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be so confident. I think you’re drastically underrating how much convenience will drive changes in behavior and social expectation. If self driving works (big if, I’m dubious about this), then the vast majority of us will switch over to using it for regular trips very quickly. As that happens, the perception about what is safe and socially acceptable will change quickly, as will the types of vehicles consu…

I wouldn't be so confident 100% ("steering-wheel-less") L5 self-driving is possible. Long tail is a thing. There will for a long time be a need for manual override, for things like tricky parking or slow-speed maneuvering, bad weather, weird lightning conditions, etc. That rules out de facto driving ban. That leaves driving ban by fiat. Also never gonna happen in this century, unless it carves out an exception for "c…

Even ignoring smokers - second hand smoking kills more than cars

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

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

#493

Post by ars »

wutbrodo wrote: post #449
ars wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. This comparison doesn't make any sense. You're comparing _continuous_ operation with the aggregate of the average human's bouts of driving. Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly. A sensible analogue would be something like aircraft software, which I'd guess does have near…

> You're comparing _continuous_ operation with the aggregate of the average human's bouts of driving.

I don't understand what you mean. I'm comparing actual time behind the wheel - hours of correct driving vs hours (well minutes) of incorrect driving.

Do the math yourself, take total hours behind the wheel and divide by the accident rate, like I did. You'll get the same results. Depending on your assumptions anywhere from 99.999 to 99.99999% correct driving by humans.

> Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly.

Again, I'm not comparing constantly, I'm comparing actual hours behind the wheel.

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

#494

Post by ars »

redbeard0x0a wrote: post #469
amcoastal wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe where you live. There's a 0% chance human driving will be banned in America until we are all well passed driving age.

It wont be banned, it will just cost much more to insure (since it will be directly tied to risk, computers already drive better than humans). If you drive manually, you will need to pay for the privilege.

> since it will be directly tied to risk, computers already drive better than humans

They do not! Are you comparing computer driving in "easy" situations with human driving in all situations?

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

#495

Post by pythonaut_16 »

nix23 wrote: post #244
sofixa wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's really the only answer. Do the research and the math for your own business/use and see if AWS is a better value than colo or your own hardware.

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

#496

Post by airhead969 »

Rent-seeking corporate vampires.

Make something so expensive or restricted that it compels people to pay much more for it "on-demand." My mom's modest new car came with adaptive cruise control that includes lane following, land changing, automatic speed matching (0 to 90 mph).. all included.

It's part of an after-sales monetization strategy like planned-obsolescence and planned-breakage by switching to cheaper, unrepairable materials like plastic and selling parts only as large, expensive assemblies.

One future extension of this is to load a car with so many features that the price then goes up far beyond what any mortal can afford, and then rent rides to replace individual vehicle ownership and taxis/Uber/ Lyft. In this event, such vehicles would be engineered for minimizing TCO for the corporation.

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

#497

Post by pythonaut_16 »

iso1210 wrote: post #485
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rental car would at least make sense though. You're already paying a cost for temporary access to the car, adding on extra features doesn't seem outrageous. It could improve availability of those features because a rental company could order a fleet with those features on all cars in their fleet and then customers who want it would be able to pay the surcharge, instead of being constrained by the portion of the fle…

Why don't they increase those rental prices anyway? A company will aim to charge the most it can to its customers.

Customers will pay more if they think they're getting more in return.

If they can increase the rental prices without extra features, then they can charge even more for extra features.

Ultimately it comes down to the business's own calculus of costs, prices, and demand.

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

#498

Post by StrictDabbler »

mikro2nd wrote: post #269
gambiting wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sub…

BMW is (has long been) an intelligence test. If you bought one, you failed. Overhyped and hugely underwhelming. I rate BMW as among the worst and most uncomfortable cars I've ever driven. And during my consulting days on the road I was in rentals probably 3 weeks out of 4, so got to do extended test drives of a significant number of vehicles.

I love renting BMWs. They feel like I'm just running along the road. I love that experience.

Then I bought a BeaterMW because I needed a car, didn't want a loan, and had access to garage space.

It was a wonderful and labor-intensive two years of driving pleasure followed by a lump of metal out front I still haven't gotten rid of.

It took a very particular set of requirements to make that a win.

I would never recommend a BMW to anybody.

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

#499

Post by kwhitefoot »

beachy wrote: post #37
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #24

I just wish we would bring back car trains. I like driving. I want to drive. There are some incredible roads in the places I go to, and I want to drive on them. However, I don’t care much for the long motorway drives through Europe that I need to do to take me to the interesting places. I want to drive my car on to a train in Kraków, hang out in the restaurant for several hours, and then drive off the train in Gdańsk…

I guess you're talking about a physical, actual train, but it would be cool to tack onto the back of a conga line of cars, and let some AI take over maintaining the gap and alignment with the vehicle in front, while grabbing a nap.

It's called platooning I think. Mercedes have done a lot of work on it for long distance trucking.

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

#500

Post by qayxc »

deathanatos wrote: post #462
qayxc wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With services in particular you indeed don't need one. No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc. The person working with a rented service infrastructure can focus on what makes them money: the process. With self-owned hardware you need contingency plans, setup, maintenance, redundant ISPs, UPS, extra electrical setup (many offices automat…

> With services in particular you indeed don't need one. > No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc. > The person working with a rented service infrastructure can focus on what makes them money: the process. No, that's just not even remotely true. VMs, managed services all require updates that are pushed to the end user of the service. Do…

I think we're talking about very different things here.

When I say "No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc." I don't mean these things don't need to happen at some point. The idea is that it's not you, as in the customer, who's responsible for this.

If I book a Redis-DB of a given size, I don't have to care about its software version, proxies, what OS it's running on, how big the VM is, what the specs are, and so forth. That's what I'm getting at.

It's far higher level than individual VMs and it doesn't mean downtimes don't happen either. It simply means it's not you, the customer, who has to troubleshoot and fix them.

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