Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 388 posts

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#311

Post by jaggederest »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #234
jaggederest wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast. Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations

There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices. I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.

Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#312

Post by tzs »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #134
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already bought the car .

I'm wondering whether it's a generational vision and that the concept of ownership of software with hardware is slowly becoming obsolete. Every young adult I know uses a subscription for everything I used to buy. Even though they own the device on which they consume it. Spotify for cd's, Netflix-Disney-Amazon for vhs and dvd's, Udemy-Masterclass for books.

CDs were around $16 in 2000, which is equivalent to around $30 today, which is around 2.3 times what a Spotify premium subscription costs for one person.

Equivalently, a Spotify premium subscription in 2000 would be a little under $7.

I guarantee that if you asked young adults in 2000 if they would be interested in a subscription that lets them listen to nearly everything available on CD, at any time, as often as they wished, for $7/month they would have been ecstatic.

Same for DVDs, which were typically in the $20-25 range for new releases in 2000. They would not have been quite as happy as they would have been with Spotify because of the way video is split among several streaming services, but it would still be seen as a tremendous improvement.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#313

Post by digitalPhonix »

ajross wrote: post #301
thebigman433 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel. The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If…

> If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several. I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers. I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it c…

> It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee

Eh? Insurance? Registration? Not a fee but ok, ongoing cost. That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.

> FSD is in fact market leading.

The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#314

Post by digitalPhonix »

Waterluvian wrote: post #126
Someone1234 wrote: post #96

A new Tesla, without subscription, now has worse Steering Assist than a $22K Toyota Corolla. Back when Autopilot launched, in consumer cars, it was pretty unique. But the market has moved on significantly, and basic Steering Assist/Full-Speed-Range Automatic Cruise Control, are pretty universal features today.

When I was testing vehicles in 2019 I found that a bunch of them had lane keeping but they kind of "bounced" between the lines. I got a Forester because for reason I typed but but aren't really topic relevant, it was far, far nicer and works amazingly. And for years whenever a Teslafriend would tout their lane keeping, I was just, "uhh yeah my base model Subaru does that." "Oh no, no this is better, this does a lot m…

> When I was testing vehicles in 2019 I found that a bunch of them had lane keeping but they kind of "bounced" between the lines

That’s lane keep/lane assist; not lane centering. It’s supposed to bounce between the edges of the lane. (I guess, not supposed to, but that’s what it does as opposed to actually tracking some position in the lane).

The auto industry as a whole did a massive disservice not clearly differentiating “lane keep”/“lane assist” v/s “lane centering”. They are hugely different and trying to use lane keep to stay centered is really dangerous.

Same model car with different trim levels/packages would have lane keep or lane centering making it really confusing to consumers what they had and what safe usage would be.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#315

Post by Ronsenshi »

Ardren wrote: post #300

Why is this story at position 261 with 269 points (@6hr)? It's been demoted so much that it's behind a 6hr post about Pistachio's with 1 point (also 6hr old) This site has become ridiculously biased.

All the Tesla investors and tech bros with stocks in TSLA are not interested in having negative news about their gold-plated goose out in the public.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#316

Post by nullocator »

t1234s wrote: post #114

FSD makes sense as a subscription as it's something that gets updated all of the time. Subscriptions to things built into the car like heated seats seems like a way to scam money out of people.

Why does FSD need to get updated all the time?

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#317

Post by wasabi991011 »

sizzle wrote: post #287
Centigonal wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To underscore this: the boneheaded decision Tesla is making is forcing customers to choose between a $99/mo subscription for FSD, and no ACC or lanekeeping assist otherwise . It's like letting people buy a subscription to the iPhone Pro Max 17 or not have any phone at all. By the way, FSD ("full self-driving") is just as inaccurately named as Autopilot. I don't know why Tesla can't call their technology, like, CyberD…

Thought the S was for supervised?

It is not. Though I noticed their main marketing page for FSD uses "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)". Not sure if this is new or how new.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#318

Post by rich_sasha »

jmb99 wrote: post #190
burningChrome wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was watching OPLive last week. Every week they have a segment called "Triple Play" where they have law enforcement send them videos of crazy chases and other interesting experiences. This last week they had a guy who had completely passed out in his car and was fast asleep at the wheel. A state trooper pulled up alongside it and could see the guy slumped over his wheel. Apparently the car was essentially weaving back…

> He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop. No such thing as a safe spot to PIT someone, ever, let alone while they're asleep at the wheel. This is a great example of why people hate all cops, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would get in front of the car and gradually slow to a stop.

It's a bit grim, but equally what else are you supposed to do? This car will definitely crash into something pretty soon.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#319

Post by rich_sasha »

idibiks wrote: post #307
eudamoniac wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather a cop risk a runner's life every time than let him continue to flee at speed recklessly for miles on end, usually culminating in crashing into an innocent person or their property. That's not even a question for me. Or would you rather just let criminals run away if they manage to enter a vehicle?

It takes two to tango, and the cop can stop the life-threatening chase at any time, without causing a wreck. Causing the speeding car to go out of control is also not a great thing for public safety, and does kill and cripple people who are in no way involved in these chases. We have jurisdictions with no-chase rules and it doesn’t seem to cause some hypothesized explosion in crime. It is in-fact ok to not do them, a…

What is the alternative? I'm not advocating causing shoplifters to crash, but I do like the idea that the police pursue criminals.

You can imagine some kind of built in remote kill switch, but I can't see that being advocated here.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#320

Post by ajross »

digitalPhonix wrote: post #313
ajross wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several. I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers. I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it c…

> It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee Eh? Insurance? Registration? Not a fee but ok, ongoing cost. That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs. > FSD is in fact market leading. The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.

> That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.

It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".

> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.

The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.

Post reply on HN