What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by em500 » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #226

ryndbfsrw wrote: post #12

You will own nothing and love it

Ownership is overrated. It's not a universally good thing. In many cases it's a huge liability. The things you own end up owning you. Would you want to own the stretch of road outside your house? What benefit would you get from it? You'd now be responsible for maintaining it and presumably you'd take out an insurance policy in case of freak events damaging it. You'd pray for a mild winter and hope your neighbours don…

> Ownership is overrated.

I'm largely with you on this, philosophically, rationally, economically. But we're probably a tiny majority, most people seem to react on emotion on this.

Amateur psychology time: I think a large component of the desire to own is insecurity about future availability and prices. In my personal case, I find that as I got older and moved up the income ladder, I seem to increasingly loose the desire to own. Partly because I can easily absorb much more price volatility now. Partly because of increased self-knowledge / life experience, that in practice there are almost no material possessions that I really want to own for very long times.

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

#322

Post by qayxc » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:38 AM UTC

bsenftner wrote: post #308

qayxc wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iron is cheap nowadays. It's the upkeep that kills you. This "1 server" is equivalent to at least two part-time admins to ensure smooth operations. No biggie if said server just hosts a static website, big deal if runs mission critical processes. That's the part too many "self-hosting" advocates conveniently leave out. A correct TCO calculation must include this cost (and proper risk assessment) and only then can a c…

Maintaining a server is one of the big scary nothings that prevents many from learning the reality of how basic and elementary it actually is. Giving/having the process developers semi-knowledgeable about devOps helps significantly. But it is not hard, and not hard to learn from zero.

We're talking about businesses here, not your private amusement, though.

As a business you need to ask yourself: and who pays for the time it takes to educate at least two employees on this "basic and elementary matter"? If it really were so "basic and elementary", how come even critical infrastructure regularly falls victim to the most primitive of ransomware attacks?

Misconfigured email and network access settings, vulnerable, out of date software stacks, non-existing contingency plans, lack of monitoring, no escalation strategy, etc. etc. Billions are lost each year due to this.

It's very easy to underestimate the actual complexity of the task in its fullest whilst overestimating one's own abilities because "it's not hard to setup NGinx and service stack XY on a random x64 box".

Anecdote from personal experience: tasked an applicant for a DevOps position with comparing two systems we could choose from for a backend service. The systems came in the form of installation packages and docker-images respectively.

Having had no experience with Docker at the time, I thought it'd safe my team a great deal of time to have the "new guy", who knew Docker inside out, deal with it.

A week later we had two results: 1) a usable comparison of the two systems and 2) an e-mail from the cloud service who informed us that the machines we rented were performing DDoS attacks on a foreign company...

New guy had forgotten to properly secure the test machines he had set up and it took hackers all of 72 hours to find and hijack them. Luckily it only took a few clicks to wipe the offending boxes, but it served as a warning for what happens if you take the whole "big scary nothings" too lightly.

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

#323

Post by marc__1 » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:40 AM UTC

This pricing strategy is as common for the auto industry as in any other: [1] "If one company bundles products, its competitors are always better off not bundling; the thing to avoid is a head-to-head competition wherein the only way to get an edge is by cutting prices"

If/when VW unbundles their pricing, another auto player will come up with a alternative version of that, and it is to consumers/gov. To decide if this is fair and advantageous.

[1] https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/bundling/

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

#324

Post by Wowfunhappy » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:40 AM UTC

My initial reaction to the headline was something along the lines of “ugh, this is awful, I can never own anything anymore.”

Then I thought about it some more. I would be 100% okay with this if Volkswagon is taking responsibility for damage caused by accidents. It makes sense that way, because every additional hour on the road adds additional risk for VW.

Whereas if I owned the self-driving software (as part of the car), I would probably expect to still be culpable in an accident. It wasn’t my fault, sure, but it was my equipment.

Whether the real world will sort itself out so logically is another matter.

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

#325

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:43 AM UTC

jusssi wrote: post #177

Danieru wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the hardware and sensors are all local, installed on the car from the factory. There is no economic advantage, just a business advantage

I think we're not anywhere near a level where a car could drive fully autonomously just with the local hardware, without a detailed data set of all the roads and real-time updates on conditions. That data set needs to be continuously maintained. Also, they'll probably need a liability insurance for cases when their autonomous car inevitably gets in a situation where it has to choose between killing it's passengers or…

One argument in favor of subscriptions is that they align the interest of the consumer and the company. With an up-front payment model, the company has no particular interest, besides customer loyalty/reputation/etc., in providing continued updates/support for older models. (Which is sometimes enough--as with Apple in many cases, but often is not as with many IoT devices.) With a subscription model they do so long as subscription revenue exceeds costs.

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

#326

Post by adflux » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:44 AM UTC

turminal wrote: post #151

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>AWS isn't a scam on companies too poor to buy servers. Do the math and see how using AWS just doesn't make sense at the scale most companies operate.

>AWS just doesn't make sense at the scale most companies operate You are delusional if you think "most companies" operate at a scale at which they can support their own datacentres

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

#327

Post by bluGill » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:48 AM UTC

iso1210 wrote: post #298

dmitriid wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least, with VW system, you pay when you use it. Doesn't work in your area, you don't pay. "AWS has billed us tens of thousands of dollars because we forgot to turn something off/confusing billing" hasn't taught anyone anything? There's nothing honest about VW's approach. They won't have self-driving either, it will be at best the same as Tesla's. And yet, they want to charge you, and charge you significantly mor…

That's the same argument against software-as-a-service Maybe I'm not bothered about self driving for 90% of my journeys, but on occasion I'm going somewhere unusual or want to travel overnight or after drinking or whatever I'll just pay for a few hours. Imagine a world where there was just a set fee of $x per hour and $x per mile to travel. Would allow a far easier choice between different modes of transport, as the…

It won't be long after self driving arrives and you won't get that option. Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases. Once self driving is better survival than humans it won't be legal to drive on public roads.

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

#328

Post by bsenftner » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:49 AM UTC

qayxc wrote: post #322

bsenftner wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a server is one of the big scary nothings that prevents many from learning the reality of how basic and elementary it actually is. Giving/having the process developers semi-knowledgeable about devOps helps significantly. But it is not hard, and not hard to learn from zero.

We're talking about businesses here, not your private amusement, though. As a business you need to ask yourself: and who pays for the time it takes to educate at least two employees on this "basic and elementary matter"? If it really were so "basic and elementary", how come even critical infrastructure regularly falls victim to the most primitive of ransomware attacks? Misconfigured email and network access settings,…

It certainly helps if one begins with experienced engineers. I am not talking about personal projects, I am discussing funded startups. If your team has not run servers on their own in the past, get a different team. It is not as if there is not a giant population of grey beards with this knowledge seeking work...

I accept your points, but far too many inexperienced devOps are given keys that should not have them. From your Docker story, it sounds like poor decision making on your behalf. Just because a developer knows Docker does not mean they know how to expose that securely to the public - far too many devs believe that's not their job.

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

#329

Post by ForHackernews » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:49 AM UTC

jjav wrote: post #161

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical co-lo is only cheaper if your time is worthless (ditto for Linux-on-the-corporate-desktop, or anything else that’s nominatively gratis). My current SaaS gig runs in Azure (App Services and containers - no VMs nor “serverless”) and being completely free of the need to do sysadmin work is just so nice. When I was colocating my own rack about a decade ago there was always something that needed my attention, be…

> Physical co-lo is only cheaper if your time is worthless Physical colocation is nearly always cheaper than AWS for most use cases. Exceptions are when your usage is so tiny that it doesn't need even a single full-time server, and, when your usage is so erratic that provisioning for the spikes doesn't make sense. For everyone else, you're paying a very large premium for AWS over what it'd cost to buy and operate som…

Again, you're completely discounting the ops time involved in "operate some servers" - how many devops/SRE folks do you need to employ to do that? And 24/7 on-call?

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

#330

Post by Danieru » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 11:50 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #325

jusssi wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're not anywhere near a level where a car could drive fully autonomously just with the local hardware, without a detailed data set of all the roads and real-time updates on conditions. That data set needs to be continuously maintained. Also, they'll probably need a liability insurance for cases when their autonomous car inevitably gets in a situation where it has to choose between killing it's passengers or…

One argument in favor of subscriptions is that they align the interest of the consumer and the company. With an up-front payment model, the company has no particular interest, besides customer loyalty/reputation/etc., in providing continued updates/support for older models. (Which is sometimes enough--as with Apple in many cases, but often is not as with many IoT devices.) With a subscription model they do so long as…

Cool, so they would refund the full price of the car if people are no longer happy with it? Or would the 20K+ car just serve as strong vendor lock to be exploited in subscriptions?