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Comment by chrismbarr | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot more to a self-diving car than just software, there is a ton of needed sensors and other hardware.

Let's say an expensive self-driving car is around $100,000 new, even buying that car used 3 years later would be out of the budget for many people.

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You are conflating cost and price?

Self-driving cars will be expensive because they will be marketed as a premium product to maximize profit.

Sometimes public service must trump? Disclaimer: I live in Sweden, so my perspective may offend you ;)

Cost and price are the same thing. Maybe you mean cost/price and worth/value?

Price is the amount the consumer pays, while cost is the price the business pays. It may cost me $5 to produce a product, which I could then sell at a price of $7, for a profit of $2.

Isn't the definition of "profit" literally the difference between cost and price?

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101314/what-differen...

My point is the BoM of self-driving sensors and cpus for a car is not actually that great. The new Teslas and Volvos don't have fancy lidar scanners like the Google cars have.

The other day I was passenger in a automatic-breaking-at-intersections Volvo. We did not put that to the test. But its 'just' higher-precision parking sensors that are cheap and ubiquitous now.

I expect that self-driving cars will -at least initially- be expensive -in large part- because the sensing and computational hardware on the car is expensive.

Once Mass production kicks in the cars will get cheaper and cheaper as the processes to create them does so.

When the automobile was first invented it would have seemed implausible for it to be accessible and (relatively) affordable to everyone. Look at where we are now.

> Once Mass production kicks in the cars will get cheaper and cheaper as the processes to create them does so.

Yes, but there is an expected near-to-medium-term price floor on the sorts of good sensing equipment that such cars will require, not to mention certified (and patent-encumbered) software to fuse that data and turn it into useful and safe action.

This is stuff that you don't want to cheap out on; it's how the car sees and operates safely!

Cars are still bloody expensive. Many many people make the decision not to buy a car when they live in a city with good public transport. It's only in places like Australia and most of the US where you practically need a car that ownership is ubiquitous. Elsewhere people find that there are better things to spend all of that money on...

It's hard to forcibly lower the price of something without undermining your economic system. Software is expensive to make. Premium priced products exist because developers cost a lot of money and take a long time to get it right.

Practically speaking you could government subsidize the software which is a respectable policy in Europe, and that would foster competition and drive the prices down.

> Self-driving cars will be expensive because they will be marketed as a premium product to maximize profit.

You have this backward. The reason entrepreneurs often start with premium products is because you can extract more money from rich people and use that to pay product development costs. Developing self-driving cars is extremely expensive, and it will be for quite a while. The costs will eventually fall, but as with personal computers, it will take a while to figure out how to do that.

If you really had cars that could self-drive and the technology was effectively free, then the profit-maximization strategy wouldn't be to sell Teslas, it would be to sell them to everybody. Tesla is selling maybe 10k cars per year. Even a $20k premium for self driving is only $200m. But the total US car market is 7 million or so. If you could get just an extra $1000, that would be $7,000m dollars in profit.

I think with self driving cars the whole ownership model will become passe.

Think of it as a fleet of autonomous taxis operating at very low cost.

I don't see a great future there myself.

Imagine this: where you pay per the minute or hour for location to location driving, at a rate that is a multiple of owning it yourself. And for the poverty, low, and middle income classes, car ownership is unattainable.

Or if you are late on your car payment and the car drives back to the lot.

An anecdotal counterpoint: I experimented with rent-per-minute cars in my local city last year. I learned that almost all my driving was commuting to work or sport practice, so I figured "what would it actually cost to get rid of the car?"

It turns out I paid appreciably less than the self-owned car model by getting an unlimited public transportation pass and using self-driving cars when I didn't feel like riding a bus or tram. Something like 40% less, I don't remember exactly now. I'd previously been driving a 7 year old Ford, so it's not like I'm comparing it to something lux.

Also, you won't have traditional car payments to be late on if it's all Just in Time provisioning and service.

It's all about overlapping layers of service though. Private ownership will make sense for some. Never owning will as well. Robust bus networks, trams/trains in very dense established areas, self-driving (or at least shared economy) cars, and lastly private-owned vehicles all converge to provide a more accessible means of public transportation.

The barrier to entry into this market is exceedingly low. You only need a few self driving cars and there's your business. Competition will drive down prices.

The barrier of entry isn't the problem. The problem is that this segment is going to reduce options to those of the lower class and poverty class.

Now, it may be of the opinion that these people don't matter. And effectively, they have roughly a 0% economic impact.

Now, prices will be driven down. But so will wages and job losses due to more automation. These people in the lowest segments will be separated their transportation via the ways I mentioned.

Now, are less vehicles on the road good? Possibly. However if the public transportation isn't able to handle it, and these auto-Ubers are too expensive, then it's like having no transportation.

> Or if you are late on your car payment and the car drives back to the lot.

If automated repossession were effective, that would drive down car ownership costs (specifically, finance charges) in a competitive market, since it would reduce the risk of loss which is part of the cost of financing, particularly for people with the worst credit condition (for whom the risk of loss for the financing firm poses a higher portion of the financing costs than other borrowers.)

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