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

#661

Post by danans » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #657

danans wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am just waiting untill I need to go to the hospital and a warning pops up: "this destination is not included in basic plan, do you want to upgrade to premium for $999" and then have it reject my card or crash or glitch out and leave me high and dry. If you are unable to drive due to an emergency medical condition, shouldn't you call an ambulance instead? Otherwise, if can't afford the self-driving service, can't…

"If you are unable to drive due to an emergency medical condition, shouldn't you call an ambulance instead?" Maybe I broke my hand, that' doesn't require an ambulance - my life is not in danger. What's the point of self-driving if you can't rely on it when I need it most? It's not about money, it's about reliability. I recently tried to get a rental bike with an app, their app crashed, refused to accept a code they s…

> Maybe I broke my hand, that' doesn't require an ambulance - my life is not in danger. What's the point of self-driving if you can't rely on it when I need it most?

The scenario you are proposing, that a autonomous driving service would deny to drive you to a hospital unless you pay them to upgrade the service, is far fetched, since nobody would buy such a service in the first place and it would go out of business. There are plenty of alternatives to ensure this, including calling an ambulance, which costs less than $999 (after insurance).

> we will loose our rights to ownership.

That's a much broader issue than autonomous driving, but even given that, what exactly do you propose to "own" in the case of a self driving service, beyond the sensors and the computer in the car? The map and traffic data, and the software that make up the system will have to be continually updated because the world is constantly changing.

The autonomous driving system's creators can either add the cost of those updates to the initial sales price (i.e. Tesla's model), pay it via a subscription, or VW's proposal which is neither a large upfront cost, nor is it a recurring subscription. This makes it accessible to a larger population.

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

#662

Post by _carbyau_ » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #293

_carbyau_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we haven't even gotten onto the ethics of - in a bad situation - choosing whether to sacrifice the passenger or another road user. Would you buy a car that throws you over a cliff to avoid ploughing through 20 kids running stupidly onto the road? I mean, in theory the autonomous driving will be good enough to protect both. But a similar scenario will come up somewhere/sometime and what is the correct answer? What…

This is just stupid. An accident is an accident and that is all there is to it, there are no ethics involved in a malfunctioning piece of equipment. People hate ethics because of stupid crap like this. Because people have a hammer (trolley problem) and every thing turns into a nail but the point of the trolley problem isn't that there are trolleys and victims. You are falling into the trap of trying to make a thought…

I am not an ethicist expert. As many people are not in a great many things. But it doesn't mean I don't care.

My point is that there is more to an accident. And hell, there very much is ethics involved in a piece of malfunctioning equipment. Ask any air crash investigator.

No one blames a human, when faced with making millisecond decisions, for not doing much. We're simply not very capable in tiny timeframes.

But will people accept the same standard for a crafted program (through whatever means) who's very promise relies on constant vigilance and sub-millisecond decisions? And what are the decisions to be?

I like your wider perspective take too. "Move fast, break things" vs "Stay safe" is a development timeframe vs cost trade off.

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

#663

Post by _carbyau_ » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 2:34 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #66

_carbyau_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we haven't even gotten onto the ethics of - in a bad situation - choosing whether to sacrifice the passenger or another road user. Would you buy a car that throws you over a cliff to avoid ploughing through 20 kids running stupidly onto the road? I mean, in theory the autonomous driving will be good enough to protect both. But a similar scenario will come up somewhere/sometime and what is the correct answer? What…

In practice, humans don't make these decisions and autonomous cars won't either. They'll default to brake and stay on the road, lacking other options, because it's the simplest option and doing aggressive dynamic things to try and prevent a bad outcome to outsiders is not really likely to have a better outcome.

I agree that at first autonomous cars won't do better. It is much easier to program within parameters like "stay in your lane". But in 100 years time I think they will have more options.

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

#664

Post by rytor718 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #631

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.

Autonomous driving is an extremely difficult problem, but it pales in comparison to the challenge of forcing a cultural shift away from driving and reimagining/rebuilding so many cities. Most Americans won't even entertain the thought of giving up their car even if alternative modes of transport make more sense.

I second the OPs sentiment: we're "solving" the wrong problems in my opinion when it comes to transportation.

But I think I disagree just a little with you that autonomous driving is extremely difficult, when the real difficulty is teaching a car to drive while sharing that road with human drivers. To the OPs point, if we were solving the problem of moving people from point A to point B, we'd realize that autonomous vehicles should not be on the road with people. They need dedicated roads, where the the problem is substantially easier to solve.

We're working on the wrong problem. The question isn't "how to do we make cars drive themselves safely while people are on board" because we have mostly solved that ages ago (see airplanes, drones, etc). The problem that needs a solution is "how do we safely and efficiently move people from point A to point B in ". The former cannot be solved. The latter is substantially easier when you remove human drivers from the road.

Now I'm not suggesting I know the solution here, but I'd like to think its pretty straightforward. Re-allocating roads for autonomous vehicles only seems like the right direction to start in. Because ideally you want to encourage people NOT to drive any way (its very expensive for most families and dangerous and tedious). You simultaneously begin to solve a host of problems: safety, remove gridlock, faster travel, cheaper. And I'm thinking all forms of transportation here, cars would be the least efficient of them all but they have an important role to play. Especially for last mile travel.

Putting aside the challenges of car-culture and entrenched interests in the auto industry, if we can give autonomous vehicles their own roads, half the things we're trying to "solve" right now would become irrelevant.

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

#665

Post by DSingularity » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

jaywalk wrote: post #607

DSingularity wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are exactly right. And then they will eventually depreciate old cars because if google can’t maintain android development for old phones why do you think Tesla will be able to do it for old cars?

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

#666

Post by Ecto5 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 3:42 AM UTC

aledalgrande wrote: post #651

munk-a wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After fiddling with a few wires to override the seatbelt check the car announced - "Congratulations a new version of iOS has been released that will improve your car's performance 20% - unfortunately this version of iOS is incompatible with your quite old car and our car software, for security reasons, requires the latest version of the operating system to execute. Please purchase a new car, now available in Rose Gol…

He was shocked. He checked the contract again and didn't see any sign of the car being connected to Apple. He was sure it was running Android. He tapped on the link on the screen to open the Apple Store. Something didn't look right: the copy was a bit off and the url was www.appleshop.com. That's when he knew his car had been infected by ransomware.

This just keeps getting better!

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

#667

Post by wutbrodo » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

bumby wrote: post #503

wutbrodo wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans drive correctly 99.99999% of the time. We can't can't even keep a computer up and running that well, never mind driving perfectly. This comparison doesn't make any sense. You're comparing _continuous_ operation with the aggregate of the average human's bouts of driving. Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly. A sensible analogue would be something like aircraft software, which I'd guess does have near…

> A sensible analogue would be something like aircraft software Does automobile software development have the level of oversight that aircraft development has in terms of regulation and approval for use? I know the NHTSA approves safety with crash tests (and are currently working on AV standards) but I'm not sure it's an equivalent to what the FAA currently does. Not to say they won't be equivalent in the future, but…

> Does automobile software development have the level of oversight that aircraft development has in terms of regulation and approval for use?

Nothing in my comment implied this, and I don't disagree that it doesn't. The question is immaterial to the specific topic of discussion: the comparison of server uptime to human-driver reliability as an indicator of the feasibility of functional AV software.

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

#668

Post by wutbrodo » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 3:51 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #521

wutbrodo wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a technology standpoint, this seems much much easier for AVs vs humans than many other AV challenges. When it comes to measuring physics precisely, complex computation, and rapid control, computers beat humans by a million miles. This is in stark contrast to, say, driving through a crowded urban environment with all manner of rule-breaking peds and bikes popping out of everywhere.

The ability to calculate the physics of driving dynamics has been solved for decades. But, if you feed garbage data to your physics models, you will get a garbage result. Computers are still very very awful at image processing as compared to humans.

Yes, I'm saying that environments with diet and gravel roads are a much easier perception problem than dense urban environments, and perception is one of autonomous driving's weak spots. Conversely, quick physics computation and response is a relative weakness of human drivers, and is exacerbated by these environments.

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

#669

Post by chmod600 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 4:54 AM UTC

sidlls wrote: post #31

chmod600 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ownership", like "privacy", just doesn't make sense in the modern complex world.

Is this satire or sarcasm or something? Genuinely asking, as it is not clear to me.

It was satire but with more than a grain of truth to it.

Meant to initiate some thought, but don't take it too seriously.

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

#670

Post by darepublic » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 4:57 AM UTC

throwawayzRUU6f wrote: post #105

alkonaut wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

If the car alerts the driver very seldomly, like once or twice in the lifetime of the car, then it could be a dangerous situation as the driver would be somewhat shocked. That or the driver would need to struggle to remain vigiliant as, day after day, the car did the right thing.