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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

#351

Post by gambiting »

andyzweb wrote: post #343
gambiting wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that the same? It's as if you bought your house, but had one room walled off with the developer saying "for only $100 a month, we will open that room up for you! isn't that great? you only pay for it if you need the extra space!" Except that obviously the room is there whether you pay the subscription or not, you paid for it in the cost of the house.

Maybe not bought but we rented a house where the owner padlocked 2 bedrooms shut and said if we wanted to use them it was an extra $200 a month to use them as home offices.

That's......beyond dumb. Like, if you don't pay him the extra $200, he's not extracting any extra value from these bedrooms. It's not like they can be rented to someone else in the meantime. So.....why do it in the first place?

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

#352

Post by eplanit »

rho4 wrote: post #193

I already pay almost $20 per day for public transportation. Of course I would switch to robotaxis for $8.50/h. Door to door, guaranteed seat, privacy, isolation from body odors & food smells, noise, loud phone conversations, screaming kids, gossiping seniors, beggars, crazies, drunks, street musicians, touching arms & thighs, ads (maybe), conductors, jehovah's witnesses, campaigners and promoters. No more waiting in…

That's a great list of public transportation experiences.

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

#354

Post by agloeregrets »

GuB-42 wrote: post #225
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…

Tesla charges $10k for not really self driving, with the promise that it will improve, and you should buy it now, because the price will increase in the future. I.e. they make you pay for something you don't have, with no guarantee that you will have it later. If it isn't a money grab, I don't know what is. And of course you can take a loan on that, so it isn't an upfront cost either. At least, with VW system, you pa…

This is a great argument. Plus VW has an incredible incentive to make it great.

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

#355

Post by relativ575 »

Nullabillity wrote: post #232
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't bring up minority use cases There are a lot of minority use cases with cars. I suspect there are more, in aggregate, minority uses than there are cases in the mode. In any event, there is a massive non-extortive beachhead for this model, as deminstrared by Uber and Zipcar et al .

Uber is a great example of how this model ends up awful for both drivers (who get awful working conditions and usually end up making a lot less net than promised) and customers (who get an awful experience, end up paying a lot more than they would otherwise, and still aren't making progress towards getting rid of that extra expense).

As a somewhat frequent user, Uber's rides have always been good experience for me. Never awful. One of nicest things is you can use it in many countries, from the same app. Taxi is a scam in a lot of places.

The complaint I have is that Uber pickup is sometimes unreliable. They may cancel after being connected, or they didn't wait at pickup points and left without contacting me.

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

#356

Post by owl57 »

WJW wrote: post #340
owl57 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, if instead of a dedicated server you rent some combination of AWS services, you suddenly don't need admin or need a cheaper one?

You don't exactly need to be an expert in object storage to stick a file into S3 and download it again some time later, just as 99% of SQL queries don't need a full blown DBA to write efficiently. (In fact, most queries are so simple that most shops have automated them with ORMs and the like) It is always the 1% of difficult stuff that hits you, but it is very rarely the correct call to optimize for that 1% instead o…

Yes? Neither you need to be an expert in file systems to stick a file on a server. And, yes, 99% of the time you don't need a DBA, just install Postgres on said server and go ahead with ORM.

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

#357

Post by mikro2nd »

kcanini wrote: post #346
mikro2nd wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BMW is (has long been) an intelligence test. If you bought one, you failed. Overhyped and hugely underwhelming. I rate BMW as among the worst and most uncomfortable cars I've ever driven. And during my consulting days on the road I was in rentals probably 3 weeks out of 4, so got to do extended test drives of a significant number of vehicles.

What are your favorite vehicles?

No favourites, really. To me they're "just transport" and cars bore me to tears, but the most comfortable drive I can recall was a Honda (model long since forgotten).

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

#358

Post by slfnflctd »

bsder wrote: post #189
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.

I still don't understand why the "autonomous driving" people aren't concentrating on freeway driving--possibly with special roadway markings--over local driving. I don't really mind driving the 10 minutes to the store. I mind driving 90 minutes between San Diego and LA. I mind driving 90 minutes between San Jose and San Francisco. I mind driving 7 hours between LA and SF. I mind driving driving 24 hours (two 12 hour…

> special roadway markings

I continue to expect something of this nature to be necessary before we get self-driving tech anywhere close to where we want it to be. Cameras simply don't work in all conditions, and even with LIDAR mistakes can be made. There needs to be an external reference point.

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

#359

Post by lordnacho »

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 just taking advantage of the poor-middle class' inability to pay a larger upfront cost, to extort them for more over a larger period of time.

Is it unreasonable, though? I can sell you access to my blog articles as they come out, or I can sell you access to all future articles, in one lump sum, now? Both of those have pros and cons.

I'm sure someone will come up with a different payment model (indeed Tesla already has?) and if it makes a difference to people, they can vote with their wallets? It would be worrying if there were only one option.

You're right about why the firms do it, of course. They want to extract as much money as they can. But there's also some value in being able to get anything at all, isn't there? Eg I can rent a seat on a plane, but most people can't buy a plane.

It's expensive to be poor, as they say. The biggest example is of course rent vs buy a house. But also things like being able to buy bulk toilet roll has a net effect on the cost.

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

#360

Post by agilob »

manquer wrote: post #240
agilob wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates says people shouldn't own land, should always rent. That another company from US (forgot name) that buys houses for 50% higher asking price, now this. These days we rent books, games, flats, soon we'll rent homes and cars. No need to own anything when you can pay more money to rent it.

Sure it this encourages rent seeking behavior and has impact on the your long term wealth. However if your able to derive utility from the product by renting why should you buy ? It is inefficient way to produce and consume goods. As a society we already waste too much by buying and hardly using things. Libraries are great way to reduce the number of actual books printed. Most people don't read most books , having a…

>As a society we already waste too much by buying and hardly using things.

Yes, but there are things like car or house that are used daily

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