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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

#101

Post by midasuni »

choward wrote: post #74
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #11

This would be ideal for myself. I spend $1500/year on insurance and about $1000 in gas on a car I barely ever drive. I am slow to get ready and leave the house as well. If this thing could just show up at my doorstep and drive me to the grocery store and back every couple of weeks for a few dollars that would be incredible! Plus I don't have to make smalltalk with a driver, bonus! Not to mention the space I would sav…

> $1000 in gas on a car I barely ever drive I wouldn't call $20 a week in gas "barely driving".

It’s a little below average

“ The average US resident drives 13,476 miles per year and spends about $1,262 on gasoline.”

But that’s immaterial.

If that’s 10,000 miles a year at an average of 20mph that’s 500 hours driving and 8,200 not driving - over 90% of the time the car is idle. I.e “hardly being used”

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

#102

Post by xivzgrev »

milchek wrote: post #87
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…

Well said, and I think the idea that in the future people will own less and rent more is discussed quite often. In the tech space this has been true for some time, hell, I still remember buying a version of Adobe Master Suite and later lamenting at the switch to subscription model. I used to be quite negative about of going further down this path, but the way I see it now, what choice do we have in the future? The wo…

How is autonomous driving an increasingly scarce resource?

The tech industry, with zero marginal cost, took to the subscription model with great success. Hugely profitable. Now every business looks to work in subscriptions.

I think what we will end up having is that initial players to offer autonomous driving will be able to charge, because it’s scarce and to recoup investment. Eventually the tech will get commoditized as computers grow ever more powerful, and someone will offer a car with free autonomous driving in order to sell more cars.

Subscriptions make the most sense for stuff you buy regularly, and stuff that can’t be monetized other ways (like Netflix). Car manufacturers are neither. Plus they have to compete with likes of Waymo and Uber - are they going to want to charge $8.50 an hr, plus the cost of gas, car, insurance etc, when I could take a self driving Uber for $20/hr?

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

#103

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

ako wrote: post #82
King-Aaron wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving along the freeway at 100mph and suddenly "sorry afk bro need to go to the toilet"

Easier solved than with a real driver, just flip a switch and transfer control to another drone pilot. Solves more issues: boring long trip, flip drivers every 30 minutes. One moment you're driving a car in texas, next moment you're driving a car in new york, and 30 minutes later you're driving the Hana Highway on Maui.

With no consequence to you if you decide to go GTA on the system, no peripheral vision, no feel of the road or wheel, assuming you at least have stereoscopic vision with a headset it’s still not at all going to work for white out or hard rain.

It’s a fun idea that we can create a whole generation of Bangladeshi click farmers that drive people instead… but it’s a nonstarter for a bunch of reasons.

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

#104

Post by 3np »

milchek wrote: post #87
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…

Well said, and I think the idea that in the future people will own less and rent more is discussed quite often. In the tech space this has been true for some time, hell, I still remember buying a version of Adobe Master Suite and later lamenting at the switch to subscription model. I used to be quite negative about of going further down this path, but the way I see it now, what choice do we have in the future? The wo…

The approach presented here is arguably the worst of both worlds, environmentally speaking; pay upfront and own the scarce hardware, rent access to the software.

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

#105

Post by throwawayzRUU6f »

alkonaut wrote: post #84
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.

If cars driving themselves will asymptotically approach say 90%, 95% or 99% or situations it can handle, then the car that also handles the last few situations will be very attractive. That's the car that can drive me home from the bar, or that a blind person can own. The 90-99% cars are still for able bodied people with licenses. At some price point, it will always be a lot cheaper to add humans than it is to make t…

There's a large and perhaps unsolvable problem of the state of the art solutions that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should - even if the car can safely handle 99% or 99.9% of the situations, the algorithms are not really able to detect if they're in the last 0.1%. The car will slam into stationary trucks, suddenly brake for no reason, consider the tollbooth to be a bus - all with utmost confidence it's doing the right thing.

In other words - the value of proposition of autonomous driving would be completely fine if the car gives up on unarguably difficult situations and alerts the driver to take over. As of now, however, the car will boldly do something stupid and dangerous.

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

#106

Post by mattlondon »

I can certainly see the value for those long boring trips we do just one/two/three times a year.

Those long 4-6 hour drives we do only a few times a year for vacations or whatever. Totally worth it IMHO if it is 100% hands-off.

I usually prefer to own my stuff than rent, but I don't think paying 10k upfront for something I only use sporadically is worthwhile so this seems great to me.

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

#107

Post by mlang23 »

This is sci-fi. AVs are not there yet. And they will not be there for some time to come. Since Google started their damn AV-car-project back around 2014 (or was it even earlier) mainstream media is full of sci-fi. I had to explain to many people that what media is waiving infront of their noses is not something they will be able to consume in the next years. I really wonder why media is so sci-fi-heavy recently. Maybe because reporting about reality has become so grim?

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

#108

Post by dlsa »

VW has an interesting prior track record with economics, truth around numbers and diesel emissions in particular.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-09/vw-charge...

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15339250/everything-you-n...

Based on that history I'm not convinced that $8.50 per hour is even remotely reasonable and they already know it. Autonomous driving is a lot cheaper.

This doesn't mean that people won't pay it. Plenty will. But its more expensive than it should be.

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

#109

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

midasuni wrote: post #93
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…

They run in several countries, but fundamentally they are very expensive (far more than $10 an hour)

My knowledge of them is from here[0] and I understand their availability to have generally declined over the past several years.

[0]: https://www.seat61.com/motorail-trains.htm

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

#110

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> This is 100% a way to extract more money from consumers, especially non financially stable consumers, while lying to all of our faces

Isn't this hyperbolic? I split time between at least two cities. Being able to pay as I go represents a real saving in cost, time and attention.

Sometimes buying is better than renting. But sometimes there are economies of centralization. AWS isn't a scam on companies too poor to buy servers.

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