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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

#601

Post by BlueDingo »

VintageCool wrote: post #148
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The slowness is the result of people trying to merge into the highway, not "bad drivers". I stand by my point on "bad drivers". It's a well-studied phenomenon[0] and it's not a matter of opinion. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4m-OJosGaI

That is a mathematical model explaining one type of traffic jam - the "phantom" traffic jam. It can explain a traffic jam on a straight section of highway with no entrances or exits -- but imagine what would happen to that model if a second line of traffic with the same density of cars tried to merge in! According to a 2005 report for the Federal Highway Administration, the leading cause of congestion is bottlenecked…

There are definitely roadways and timing that cause the problem you mentioned but the parent poster is also accurate. So many large scale highway slowdowns and jams are caused by bad drivers not utilizing the left lanes causing the accordion effect in the merging lanes and soon the whole road is at a crawl.

If the drivers staying in the far right lane didn't do that mindlessly (their exit is not next or soon, why are they there?) or if they actually kept space open ahead of them for the cars they can see are about to merge, these problems would largely evaporate.

I'm paraphrasing poorly but, "do things slowly so that they go smoothly. Things done smoothly go fast."

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

#602

Post by naravara »

kuratkull wrote: post #590
ericmay wrote: post #579

I'll never understand why we're hell-bent on making sure people are driving around in cars. Instead of solving the problem of commuting by not having cars and by building better, we're just making commuting better and more optimized. It's so stupid. We should be making it so that you don't have to commute, not that you can do more work while you commute or w/e.

Driving is faster, your car is available virtually 24/7, you own(many animals like owning things) your car, you can personalize your car - in short, cars are personal, commuting is public. Also time is money.

> Driving is faster

Maybe, depending on traffic. But parking sure as shit isn't.

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

#603

Post by toss1 »

soco wrote: post #142
toss1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were no way to turn it off so any driving cost $8.50/hr, I'd be with you. But if it can be turned off and I can just drive as today as with a normal car, and I'm not paying any extra for the idle feature set, where's the problem? With the current state of autonomous driving, I'd never use it anyway. No feature I've read about is good enough to just sleep in the backseat. Expecting the driver to be 90%+ idle…

I'm afraid the single model market is the way of the future. Why wouldn't VW bank on the same enslaving system all other corporations so easily get away with? Other commenters talk about going to the competition if we're unhappy - except the entire competition does exactly the same so there's no alternative. A market opening, would say some? No there's none, the subscription model is too profitable for any CEO to eve…

Sadly, you're probably right, some kind of quasi-Nash Equilibrium local maxima that sucks for everyone.

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

#604

Post by berkes »

adflux wrote: post #431
whoknew1122 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all fun and games until that co-lo goes down and with it your entire business. Speaking from someone who moved a SaaS operation from co-lo to AWS. Everyone (especially the C-suite) was much happier.

Always fun to see people compare bare metal costs to actual running cost of cloud infrastructure. For some reason such advocates always think the system administrators work for free, the network will always work, the machine will never break, the machine will not need to be replicated etc etc etc

To drive home an argument a co-owner of an old hosting company I had, calculated the costs for replacing a single HDD.

Everything from buying the HDD, to his hours to the parking ticket at the data-center. He convinced me and the point was clear: a single failing HDD would costs us more than renting similar computing power for over 6 years. We had two such failing HDDs in three years prior.

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

#605

Post by doggosphere »

ericmay wrote: post #598
doggosphere wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People enjoy going to concerts, restaurants, seeing their family, etc.

Yea so you just go do those things. I'm not sure what this has to do with driving or commuting to a job on the highway?

How do you do those things without driving? Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation?

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

#606

Post by jaywalk »

cactus2093 wrote: post #562
jaywalk wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no way the hardware on my car is the limiting factor I'm not sure why you'd make that assumption. The newer models that can do more may very well have more/better sensors, faster processor(s), more RAM, etc. Just because the interior and exterior look the same doesn't mean that everything else is the same too.

I guess I can't know for sure about any one particular feature. But as far as I can tell, the company doesn't ever backport any smart/autonomous features to older models. Whereas Tesla manages to do this continuously, and years earlier than other brands. I doubt that every single incremental improvement to one of these features relies on brand new hardware or sensors that was not available the year before. Some of th…

Tesla builds their cars with this in mind, and pretty much nobody else does. Even for updates that are purely software, that software may not even be updatable without physical access to the module(s) that run it.

The idea of a car you bought being updated new features from the manufacturer down the road didn't even exist until Tesla. The legacy car manufacturers can't just turn on a dime and start doing the same thing for many reasons, ranging from accounting and contractual issues to actual technological ones.

None of it is as simple as it may seem.

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

#607

Post by jaywalk »

DSingularity wrote: post #577
jaywalk wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what? Putting better stuff in newer models? That's how basically every product works.

For not being transparent with consumers. What will happen when one day you turn on your Tesla and it relays a message to you that FSD is disabled because you are missing hardware required by the new version?

Well a lawsuit would be 100% justified in that case. I think the far more likely scenario is that Tesla would release an update that simply wouldn't apply to vehicles with the missing hardware, which would stay back on the older version.

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

#608

Post by johndubchak »

Jemm wrote: post #583
ako wrote: post #26

With that pricepoint, maybe you don't need to implement actual autonomous driving, but instead it could be implemented by employing millions of dronepilots in some far away country that drive your car for you.

Frankly I am amazed we don't already have remotely piloted vehicles.

Sadly we do, they're just called drones and they are used to kill people. (Sorry, don't mean to be so dystopian)

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

#609

Post by CharlesW »

Jemm wrote: post #582

Never in a million years am I going to pay a subscription to use my own vehicle. Sad thing is that people will and it will become mainstream leaving those like me driving our old clunkers. Already kind of happening now, most people happy to buy cars with no dip stick for the oil, no spare tire and mostly unrepairable except by the dealer. The rest of us are out in our old Toyotas and Hondas that we are keeping alive…

> Never in a million years am I going to pay a subscription to use my own vehicle.

People pay a subscription (data, if not apps) to use their phone. Most people pay at least one subscription in association with the TV they own. I'm wondering if part of this may be the "shock of the new" talking.

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

#610

Post by lazerpants »

ericmay wrote: post #597
kuratkull wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving is faster, your car is available virtually 24/7, you own(many animals like owning things) your car, you can personalize your car - in short, cars are personal, commuting is public. Also time is money.

> Driving is faster It's not, if you build correctly. It's only "faster" when you spread things out into suburbia. Is it faster for you to get in your car and drive next door or to just walk over there? Of course its faster to walk. Walking is faster. You can't just say "driving is faster" without qualifications. > your car is available virtually 24/7 So are your legs. Walk and bike. I don't see the relevance of many…

My work brings me into contact with many high net worth individuals in Manhattan. They all take cars most of the time. It is faster than the subway, usually, and even when it isn't you can get more done in the car. Even in the U.S.' most dense area driving is usually faster, and it is certainly more pleasant/productive.

Edit: I'll note that many of them will take the subway during rush hour if both ends of the trip are within a couple of blocks of the subway. However, if there is a transfer they won't, the subway becomes time inefficient very quickly if you have to walk far from it or wait for multiple trains.

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