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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

#501

Post by pythonaut_16 »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #486
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a one time unlock fee and paying a subscription on a hardware feature are vastly different things. You might still disagree with both, but they are different. Heated seats are a pretty standard upgrade that people will pay for, so I'm not sure that it makes much difference whether it's a physical upgrade or a software unlock, and there are valid reasons Tesla might choose a software unlock. But charging a subs…

It's not necessarily as different as it seems. When you buy a second hand Tesla from Tesla it can happen that a feature that the previous owner had has been disabled. Tesla has in fact been accused of disabling features of cars that were not sold through them. Does the 1000 USD upgrade buy the feature or merely enable it for the time that the owner owns the car?

Charging a new owner to unlock the feature again is slightly different than charging the original owner a subscription.

However, I still see selling features as a software upgrade strictly as an alternative means* of selling upgrades. So the upgrade should be tied to the car, not the owner. The added bonus here would be that a second owner could unlock features that the initial owner didn't want.

*i.e. Tesla might decide it's better just to put the heated seats in all cars rather than manufacturing cars with and without.

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

#502

Post by kwhitefoot »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #123
midasuni wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they don’t justify the massive subsidies. Sleepers have had a little resurgence over the last year or two, but motorail demand is low and costs are high. Demand at market price is even lower. With a good motorway network and reliable cars people just aren’t willing to spend 5 times the price to go on a train. Even they were, it’s not sustainable. Far better to fly or train to a remote city and hire a car on a…

I guess I'm surprised and dismayed that there isn't more of a market for it. Hire cars are a bland, pedestrian experience, and I'm sure quite many people would rather drive their own interesting car on interesting roads. Not everything needs to be a race to the bottom — there are still people who pay a premium for a better experience. I would think also that government subsidies for this kind of service are justified…

> Hire cars are a bland, pedestrian experience,

They don't have to be, although he alternatives are expensive. I rented a BMW 438i convertible for a couple of weeks about six years ago. Brilliant car and even though it was a lot more expensive than the usual boring vehicles I rent it was worth it.

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

#503

Post by bumby »

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…

>A sensible analogue would be something like aircraft software

Does automobile software development have the level of oversight that aircraft development has in terms of regulation and approval for use? I know the NHTSA approves safety with crash tests (and are currently working on AV standards) but I'm not sure it's an equivalent to what the FAA currently does.

Not to say they won't be equivalent in the future, but I don't know how well the analogue holds up if they don't have equivalent levels of quality oversight currently.

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

#504

Post by qayxc »

owl57 wrote: post #443
qayxc wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless that file is to be read by 1000 users simultaneously - that's where the fun begins ;)

Agree, when you have thousands of simultaneous users, it could be time to think what the hell are you doing. But the number sounds a bit off… I have fuzzy memories of some fun around that many concurrent requests with Apache 1.3 — that is, one process per user. Doesn't the fun begin quite a bit higher with just any more modern software?

> Doesn't the fun begin quite a bit higher with just any more modern software?

You tell me, I'm not a sysadmin:) I can only attest to the fact that without any kind of RAID or suitable hardware setup (RAM for caching, fast networking etc.), even a dozen people accessing the same file can be very problematic (provided the file is large enough).

As for the use case: digital content creation comes to mind. Sharing assets globally especially in times like these when more people are working remotely is such use case.

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

#505

Post by NegativeLatency »

nico_h wrote: post #407
judge2020 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Considering nobody’s made full self driving cars that work well we don’t have any upper bounds on cost/team size.

There’s also no way I’d pay per hour for this kind of add on to a product I own.

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

#506

Post by smnrchrds »

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…

> They wouldn't have to pay all the attendants to sit around

They don't. Flight attendants only get paid when the doors are closed.

Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/westjet-minimum-wage-cupe-c...

US: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/flight-attendant-tiktok-dishing-jo...

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

#507

Post by gambiting »

geonic wrote: post #488
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…

It's an interesting question. I bought the car. Ownership transferred to me. What if I decide to rewire some of the electronics and unlock heated seats or some other paid extra?

I imagine they will make an argument that while you own the hardware, you are breaking the terms and conditions of their software. You never paid them to unlock the heated seats in software. Of course that argument fails if you get it modded so there's an extra button on the side and it just provides power to the seats, bypassing the rest of the system. It's going to be a fun legislative challenge once someone inevitably brings it to court, I'm sure.

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

#508

Post by mikestew »

SamBam wrote: post #388
ec109685 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you know your father best, but it at least seems from your words it makes him happy. As someone with similar car, you get to know it’s quirks and use it when it adds value.

GP's post makes it sound like the father is stuck with wanting to love it, and needing to show how much he loves it, to justify his choice and stave off buyer's remorse. That's fairly common when people make a purchase that's too expensive and then is not quite as perfect as they had hoped. Obviously we don't know GP's dad, but that was clearly the intent of GP's post.

I was reminded of campfire discussions of specific brands of motorcycles while reading GP's post. Some of those owners really go out of their way to justify the purchase, while I'm pretty sure they're only trying to convince themselves.

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

#509

Post by JamesBarney »

tempestn wrote: post #51
JamesBarney wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention connectivity

As long as connectivity was 'good enough', the car could have just enough self-driving capability to safely pull over in the case of an interruption. Would still need to be some nines, but wouldn't need to be utterly perfect.

I don't think safely pulling over a car is any easier to automate than the rest of driving. Those are some of the most complex maneuvers where you're at least as likely to hit a civilian or another car as driving down the street.

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

#510

Post by devoutsalsa »

anastalaz wrote: post #258
devoutsalsa wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah. I clearly missed the point of the article.
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