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 ;)
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.