What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In his glove compartment he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his car for taxiing him about while he listened to his morning HN podcast constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the car said. It sounded smug.
Also amusing is the normalization: "Free!" He stared at her. "That's not economically feasible. How can it operate on that basis? For more than a month?"
Dave pressed the cancel button with furious determination. The VW Bug sped off from his modest suburban house. It's high G wheels speeding up and zooming past Burb beaters and Bimbo wagons.
Unbeknownst to him a catastrophic situation was looming...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yyyd/this-motorcycle-airba...
I don't see this company lasting long after the first crash where someone thought they were protected but were not due to payment error/ddos/whatever.
Though also, at the same time the liability questions would quickly become... Complicated.... With that model
'I'm sorry! Hit a lag spike, blame Telus.'
The issue is not the idea of remote control per se, though connection drops etc. would be a risk, but the notion yoga can outsource it to somewhere with far cheaper labour.
Playing a game with input lag is terrible because you always need need to do all your inputs ahead of time in anticipation what a frame 100ms in the future will tell you. That might make precise control very difficult, not just in unanticipated situations such as e.g. emergency braking.
Unexpected road accidents typically involve someone who may not even be thinking about driving, who then have to notice the random screech, focus their eyes and process what's happening, then determine they need to immediately break, then break.
The problem with input lag isn't that human input is under 100ms, it's that too much of a gulf between input and on-screen response breaks the feedback loop - your brain struggles to connect your input alterations to an alteration actually happening. If you're throwing a ball, when you twist your wrist the ball is twisted immediately when the wrist holding it is twisted (because it's physically pinned to the hand that's physically attached to the wrist, and literally cannot be out of sync with the fingers gripping it).
It's like how VR users need under 30ms of latency or they throw up, except less drastic.
It’s a fun idea that we can create a whole generation of Bangladeshi click farmers that drive people instead… but it’s a nonstarter for a bunch of reasons.
Not sure what you mean with Bangladeshi click farmers
There would be licenses, regulations, threat of lawsuit, qualifications and all sorts of other mandatory requirements. If someone wants to be cynical then, yes, a lot of these safeguards would not be put in place until after a certain number of deaths had been exceeded. eg seat belts, air bags, traffic lights, speed limits, road rules in general.
The idea is still viable.
These already exist in Taxis, and have you ever been in a Taxi? Their drivers aren't exactly the pinnacle of driving excellence.
Human intelligence could be useful for navigating construction work.
Really, what we need is to overhaul road construction (and maybe roads in general) signage and protocols to make them machine-readable, not just human readable.
At some price point, it will always be a lot cheaper to add humans than it is to make the cars "self driving". And the last % I'm almost certain will never be cheap enough for autonomy.
In other words - the value of proposition of autonomous driving would be completely fine if the car gives up on unarguably difficult situations and alerts the driver to take over. As of now, however, the car will boldly do something stupid and dangerous.
Since my last service, it seems they've updated it and it's far more sensitive than it used to and seems to break in many situations where it previously did not. What sucks about that is the vehicles behind me are caught off-guard with no obvious signs of the need to break and then the jackass in the GMC SUV slams on his breaks.
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 shifts) between San Diego and Austin.
And for those of you suggesting car rentals, have you seen the price of car rentals even before Covid? It was getting to the point that car rental was often more expensive than airfare.
Cars in cities today are incredibly stupid compared to public transit. Full autonomy could change that.
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.
The physics of the eye are relatively complex, the data processing and recognition we do more so, and the ability to dynamically mentally model a set of controls onto a vehicle of arbitrary shape and dimension even more so.
Cameras are not eyes, the algorithms we use to detect are completely different, the algorithms we use are completely different.
I can't prove that it is impossible, but its different enough that it might be. A bit like saying a tomato and a brocoli are both vegetables with organic matter, but good luck making Tomato Juice with broccoli.
Also see Comma's Openpilot for adding automatic lane centering to a recent 3-4 year old car from Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and others.
Makes me wonder what those humans are now doing for a living.
I also see people very quickly stop using their autopilot, as you will think ca. twice a day: "so do I really want to spend 8.50 right now?"
A train isn’t affected by people randomly braking or weaving around different lanes because they lack driving skill. A train also isn’t as affected by inclement weather.
There is the classic set of pictures showing how much space is needed to transport 60 people by bus, by bike, and by car.
https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
On my (pre-covid) morning commute to the office, most of the cars crawling along the highway had one person in them. The slowness is the result of people trying to merge into the highway, not "bad drivers".
Another way to illustrate how much space cars take up is to look at suburban office parks. There will be a small building (usually 1 or 2 stories) surrounded and dwarfed by a parking lot.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2014/...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Liberty+Lake,+WA/@47.67315...
I stand by my point on "bad drivers". It's a well-studied phenomenon[0] and it's not a matter of opinion.
According to a 2005 report for the Federal Highway Administration, the leading cause of congestion is bottlenecked infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_congestion#Causes
I used to drive 405 North into Bellevue, WA. In the space of 3 miles, 3 highways merged into 405 North. There was always a traffic jam, every morning. It started at roughly the same spot every morning. It cleared up at roughly the same spot every morning. That was slow traffic caused by the infrastructure.
If the drivers staying in the far right lane didn't do that mindlessly (their exit is not next or soon, why are they there?) or if they actually kept space open ahead of them for the cars they can see are about to merge, these problems would largely evaporate.
I'm paraphrasing poorly but, "do things slowly so that they go smoothly. Things done smoothly go fast."
Sleepers have had a little resurgence over the last year or two, but motorail demand is low and costs are high. Demand at market price is even lower. With a good motorway network and reliable cars people just aren’t willing to spend 5 times the price to go on a train.
Even they were, it’s not sustainable. Far better to fly or train to a remote city and hire a car on arrival.
They don't have to be, although he alternatives are expensive. I rented a BMW 438i convertible for a couple of weeks about six years ago. Brilliant car and even though it was a lot more expensive than the usual boring vehicles I rent it was worth it.
Reading the article: Oh this is charging me to use a feature in a car I already own, okay great, I will continue never owning a Volkswagen.
Volkswagen and Tesla are at the forefront of a 'Great Reset' in cars: turning car owners into car renters. Sure the base car is owned, but all the extra services needed to get the most out of your car become rented, it might as well be rented.
My car doesn't play those games, it's a simple car, no infotainment system, no self driving or autopilot features, no subscription features. Everything works exactly as expected, something breaks and it's easy to fix. Even thought its super basic and doesn't have any modern features, its my favorite car I've ever owned.
If it was just cost and utility (i.e. "yeah it sucks, but I can do x,y,z.. with it") I suppose that makes sense, and I'm glad it turns out you enjoy it. It just seems like 4Runners specifically have quite an enthusiastic following, I'm quite interested to know why someone would seek out an old one who specifically was not stoked about it.
As a Toyota enthusiast, even I couldn't stomach the prices being asked, and I actually wanted one. But I wasn't going far enough from civilization to justify that premium for reliability.
I'd say a used 4Runner is by far the least cost effective choices to deal with inclimate weather, so it seems strange how someone paid top dollar for a vehicle they didn't want. It's like buying a Gucci shirt you don't want.
I've always hated SUVs, but with some lifestyle changes it was clear that my current car then would not suffice and I would need an SUV. So going into this I had the expectation that the car would suit my needs but I wouldn't love the car like some of the previous sports cars I owned.
I wasn't much into offroading before I got this 4Runner and I mainly bought it because it was so popular. Much like if you walk into a new restaurant where half the folks in there order one thing off the menu, you get that because if others are raving about it, there must be something there.
Dense stop-and-go traffic is probably where I want autonomous driving the most. It's one of the most frustrating driving experiences for me. But it will be hard for me to switch on autonomous driving: Not only am I going to waste my time in traffic and my gas from idling, now I'm going to waste money per minute to let the car inch forward.
I suppose there are situations where I would enable autonomous driving, like in an unfamiliar city or if I had been drinking at all (assuming it's safe and legal). This would probably add up to something like 10 hours per year, which seems like a huge waste of a big technological advancement.
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 a larger period of time.
The average person in the northeast spends 31 minutes commuting per day [2], for simplicity that's 0.5 hours,* 2 commutes a day, * 5 days a week, * 50 weeks a year (assuming 2 weeks vacation), is 250 hours commuting a week. At ~9 dollars including tax per hour, that means in just 4.4 years[3] it's already more expensive to rent this feature if the surcharge is initially 10k as VW claims. This is true even if the car is used ONLY for commuting, which is likely a non-major portion of use time.
This is 100% a way to extract more money from consumers, especially non financially stable consumers, while lying to all of our faces.
[1] https://moneywise.com/managing-money/budgeting/boots-theory-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/798393/us-workers-averag...
[3] https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a33235649/ownership-co...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1932%E2%80%931938:_...
>The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine
I used to be quite negative about of going further down this path, but the way I see it now, what choice do we have in the future? The world population is growing, resources are limited. Is it it feasible that we can all own houses, multiple cars, gadgets etc?
I don't know anymore what the 'right' approach is here. Do we allow people to own and consume as much as they want forever or will the future be radically different in this sense where no one owns anything (car, property or gadgets)? The model that works now may not work forever.
Curious to hear from someone more well versed in this kind of topic on their thoughts?
The tech industry, with zero marginal cost, took to the subscription model with great success. Hugely profitable. Now every business looks to work in subscriptions.
I think what we will end up having is that initial players to offer autonomous driving will be able to charge, because it’s scarce and to recoup investment. Eventually the tech will get commoditized as computers grow ever more powerful, and someone will offer a car with free autonomous driving in order to sell more cars.
Subscriptions make the most sense for stuff you buy regularly, and stuff that can’t be monetized other ways (like Netflix). Car manufacturers are neither. Plus they have to compete with likes of Waymo and Uber - are they going to want to charge $8.50 an hr, plus the cost of gas, car, insurance etc, when I could take a self driving Uber for $20/hr?
Space is the scarce resource. In a city that's full of 90% of the time parked cars it doesn't really make sense for everyone to have their own car. Autonomous driving just combines the best of Uber and car sharing.
For moving heavy things: come on, how big of an impact on city traffic is this really?
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4049509,8.5855091,3a,75y,292...
I say, the more competition for banks, the better.
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 servers.
It often is, for small and medium business (traditional ones) it's often cheaper to rent DC-Space and buy some servers yourself...but hey if you pay and don't do the math, that's your problem.
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 it security updates, some new unexpected error in the syslogs, RAID drive failing, etc - that I’d need to commute to the DC an hour away or pay the DC’s helping-hands fees. Back when I was younger it was fun and valuable to gain those experiences, but right now I’m a west-coast SWE and no employer wants me to spend my time doing sysadmin/SRE work when my time is literally worth ten times more doing product work and letting MS’ Azure staff keeping things humming along.
For high-availability, AWS/Azure/GCP all the way! There’s no way a micro-ISV SaaS vendor can compete if they have to burn cycles doing unprofitable infrastructure work.
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 some servers.
AWS have managed services for a lot of different things, which save a lot of time on maintenance. Object storage? Message queue? Any type of database? ML? etc. etc. etc.
And of course, there's the scalability. With on-prem it's a careful balancing act of buying enough capacity to have space to expand but not too much to waste it, and you have to regularly keep an eye out lest you hit a limit with multi-week lead times ( e.g. you're out of storage, and buying a new shelf can take weeks to be usable).
The benefit of AWS-style comes in at
1) Flexibile workflows (I need the grunt on mondays, but not the rest of the week)
2) Tiny workflows (I just want a couple of $5/month VMs in different cities and some DNS to host a couple of toys)
Now if you have the $8/hour self drive, that's great if you use it once a year on a 10 hour trip to a holiday destination. It's awful if you use it for 2 hours a day.
I do save the few staff hours needed on physical maintenance of racking, cabling and replacing hardware. But at typical startup scale that's not much work. In the past I've done it myself on the side. As the company gets larger it takes dedicated staff, but at that point the comparable AWS bill is so large I could pay their full year salary on a single month of AWS bills.
I ran a cloud platform production system for 6 years with multiple replicas of all systems and it cost around £400/month, a tiny amount compared to even a single person to manage your own servers.
Your example doesn't apply. You don't rent a server from AWS, you pay for their services. If the AWS cost was just getting you a VPS, then you would have a point.
I'm not saying AWS is (always) a good deal, but the cost is quantifiable, compared to buying a server or renting a VPS where all the extra ops work isn't (easily).
Yes, which can be bought elsewhere, which was the entire point.
> and humans behind to intervene in case of necessity ( à la Waymo).
I have no idea, does it?
Please don't bring up minority use cases when discussing the average or modal use case.
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.
I’ve never found Uber worse than cabs and maybe 1 in a 100 Ubers is dirty or smelly, reminding me of how awful cabs used to be about half the time. Many drivers seem about as happy as random workers in other industries but some seem quite a bit happier with their arrangement with Uber than most service workers seem to be.
Uber relies on the drivers underselling themselves though, which isn't good for society, but is great for the individual rider.
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.
> 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.”
Especially if VW isn't actually "taking a swipe at" Tesla but instead going after a different market.
It is like saying calling a bagel a counterfeit bowl of cereal.
For someone who only occasionally needs heated seats, this is value adding.
I agree that forcing everyone into a subscription is coercive. But there are a lot of people for whom the flexibility of a subscription creates more value than it costs. Rejecting it ex ante because of its financing model is overly simplistic.
With heated seats the hardware to provide the functionality was either fitted or not, once it leaves the factory it's static and so it seems pretty unreasonable to me to charge an ongoing fee for the privilege.
A world where my car gets micro-transactions to turn on the AC or heaters etc scares me.
Why wouldn’t this apply to an autonomous driving service?
There’s a cost to VW to keep that system running. They have to staff SWEs that can write security patches, have to maintain outdated methods to update the software, etc.
And this isn’t really optional for VW to do it as if there’s a problem on a 2000 pound vehicle moving at 60 miles per hour things can get deadly quickly. For example what if there was a way to get into the car’s computer via the map software that was last updated 4 years ago? Maybe a hacker could then turn off power steering? Yes that is a hypothetical but there’s always problems with software and they need to get fixed when the consequences of not fixing them are high.
Like, going back to my maps example - if I never pay VW for a map upgrade, my 10 year old satnav system will absolutely mislead me and try to direct me in places which could be potentially dangerous. And like....so what? The system that was installed from the factory still works, that's the point.
These current systems that we have are all just glorified cruise control systems - and whatever you have in your latest Merc/BMW/Audi/Volvo/whatever will continue to work until the car itself falls apart. As far as I can see VW isn't proposing anything different - other than the payment scheme for it.
Also, as for hacking risk - this is a massive risk on nearly all new vehicles on the road today and very little is being done to address it. VW charging for autonomous driving capability has little to do with that.
And to add another example - there's a famous case where a woman's car has caused $180M worth of damage, as it has caught fire while being transported inside a cargo ship. Turns out there was an outstanding recall on that vehicle due to....fire risk. So initially insurers wanted to put all blame on her, since she didn't have the vehicle fixed despite the recall. But they all got nowhere, because there isn't currently any law that says you have to get your vehicle fixed when a recall is issued. Similarily, the manufacturer isn't obliged by law to make sure any recall is followed, so they were off the hook as well.
What I mean to say is that these hypothetical situations are interesting to talk about, but with the current state of tech and law none of it is an actual concern.
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 killing someone outside the car.
Of course, they could offer a pricing model where all that is paid up front, but I doubt it would be very attractive.
Unlike with say housing, which sits on land which appreciates in value at a rate and has a high cost of moving (monetary and personal), a typical car for the majority of people is a means to an end which just sits their and deprecates. The cost of changing to a new car is a few minutes reprogramming the radio and seats.
Ultimately what most people want is transportation which costs a reliable x¢ per mile at a given level of convienience, reliability and comfort.
Cars are hardly a winner takes all business or one with little competition - there's at least a dozen major manufacturers.
If your self-driving system requires some centralised service to operate properly, it can hardly be fully autonomous under all conditions. How can it react immediately to an emergency situation if it's not running locally?
And if you're not talking about that but just ongoing development work and making updates available after the sale, there's nothing that means that has to be a mandatory service. Either the original version works properly or it doesn't (and in this case, if it doesn't, it shouldn't be allowed on the roads and the regulators should eat the vendors alive). Any subsequent updates that somehow improve the "quality" of the system could be made available at an extra charge, just like new products or new versions of software in a million other contexts, without any need for compulsory ongoing payments where the system stops working if the customer stops paying.
If a car company would charge me per day for heated seats, that would work for me, I don't use them that often. If they make me pay per year and they're installed in the car already... They've given me a nice electronics challenge, which adds value?
If VW spends 700 million on making self driving they want to get more then that back. They can do so by charging everyone 10k more for the car, but it would make the car expensive and decrease sales volume requiring an even higher price. Or they can come up with some other model where users with less budget pay less while those that can afford it pay more. In that case you need to make it so that those that pay more get more benefits, and their idea for that is charging by hours of usage.
I'm not sure I'm happy with that as a customer, but the model isn't crazy.
Therein lies the rub.
It's the HN community that have created this. If I have an EC2 VM, I have to pay Amazon a micro-transaction for every dns request they serve and every time I as much as ping my box
I don’t understand this argument. Would it feel different if you had to install the FooBar component to get it to work? That the act of having to do something physically can then justify the additional cost?
I’m all for a rental market like this. It no longer means that in the used car market there’s 100 different cars of model XYZ to look at as there’s 2^n different combinations of options to consider. All of that model are the same and then you unlock features.
Short answer.
No, not really; a manufacturer can't simply lump the price of all the unused stuff onto the base price. It would hand the low end to their competitors.
Longer answer.
Assuming that the manufacturers are not operating as a cartel (which is a different discussion), a manufacturer simply adding the total cost of all non-activated equipment and services onto the base price would be competitive suicide in the low(er)-end market. So no sane manufacturer would ever do that - they don't need to.
Instead, as long as the manufacturer's cost reductions through simplified design, production, inventory etc., plus the upselling revenue are greater than the additional hardware and licensing costs. Then they can, at least in theory, include heated seats, air conditioning, self-driving and whatever extra crap they like for no, or very little, additional initial outlay to the base model purchaser.
Of course, purchasers (and the planet) will pay for it in degraded acceleration, braking and fuel economy if extra weight is involved. Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but given the number of pointless SUVs and Trucks on the roads, it's hard to imagine that'd be a concern to the average purchaser.
While binning goes on with desktop and commodity server processors, by and large manufacturers can't play too many games with building in unused capacity.
However, at the high-end, especially mainframes, you absolutely have features like capacity on demand and pricing by workload and there was even more of this sort of thing in the past.
No, for someone who only has a 3 year lease on a BMW, this may be value adding (or value subtracting).
The money you save by not paying for heated seats when you buy the BMW does not go into your pocket when you sell the BMW without heated seats, as whoever buys the BMW from you will pay less for a BMW in which heated seats are free than one in which heated seats cost $100/year.
For a car with a 20 year life, you'd profit if 1 year of heated seat rental costs less than 1/20 the price of heated seats if bought up front. This is true whether you own the car for 1 year or 3 years or 20 years. It does not matter how long you personally plan on owning the car.
It does not matter who sells the car. What matters is whether:
(the price of used car with heated seats that must be paid for) - (the money already made from renting out heated seats) > (price of a used car with heated seats that are free)
The identity of the seller does not alter this equation at all, nor can it flip a loss to a gain.
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.
You are assuming demand is equal for all of those. It might be in some places, but not others.
…or maybe that was your point?
It annoys me to no end because it means you are paying(in the cost of the car) to have all of this advanced tech in the car, but you can't use it without subscription. What if I get a modder to enable it anyway? Am I now a criminal? What about the environmental impact of lugging around hardware that you don't want or need, just in case you or the next owner wants it?
Even a rental car doesn’t quite match, since you are in a particular car.
It could improve availability of those features because a rental company could order a fleet with those features on all cars in their fleet and then customers who want it would be able to pay the surcharge, instead of being constrained by the portion of the fleet with those features installed.
Of course it would likely just be used as a way to increase rental car prices.
A company will aim to charge the most it can to its customers.
If they can increase the rental prices without extra features, then they can charge even more for extra features.
Ultimately it comes down to the business's own calculus of costs, prices, and demand.
Sell something without the extra costs and will people pay more? In the housing sector in the UK that's certainly not the case -- people didn't value freehold over leasehold until lots of media coverage, despite the information being right there for all to see.
In a situation where there's a monopoly/cartel, the consumer that actually looks at the total costs and benefits can lose out because there aren't enough knowlegable customers to make an old fashioned business viable, but in industries with low barriers to entry and low network effects it's not a problem.
In the above comment you seemed to suggest that companies would already be charging more for rental cars if they could.
So I pointed out that consumers might be willing to pay more for a rental in return for a higher perceived value in the form of extra features being enabled.
And people buy this?
I am beyond incredulous and want to pinch myself. Offering Apple/Android play as subscription was bad enough and an automatic deal-breaker, but this is just ludicrous.
Like, it makes sense to a lot of people. BMW loves this, corporate fleets love this. But as it slowly becomes standard we all lose.
Also, Tesla sold exactly this for a while(don't know if they still do) to hit their $35k promise of a Model 3 - the car had heated seats installed, but you had to pay a one time $1000 fee to Tesla to unlock them.
No one in a fleet vehicle pays for their own 'upgrades', man.
DLC on cars and people are here defending it, I lost my shit over games doing it. We went from pay once for the game, maybe another expansion thay doubled your vanilla game. Now every company nickles and dimes us to death. Does no one remember banks being shit on for that in the 80s-90s?
>>My 2009 328i has heated seats I've never once had to pay to activate.
Yes, what's your point?
>>No one in a fleet vehicle pays for their own 'upgrades', man.
In modern 2021+ and higher BMW models in the US, they do, man. That is literally BMW's payment model on NEW cars. Don't know why you'd assume I'm talking about a 2009 model.
>>DLC on cars and people are here defending it
So far I had like 40 replies to my comment with maybe one or two people defending the practice. Is it really worth getting upset over it(the people commenting, not the practice)?
Future 1:
I'm working for a company and I buy the heated seats upgrade.
Eight months later I'm looking at moving to another company and I'll lose that value. Maybe that affects my decision.
So I'm paying for my own employer-lock-in loyalty perks? Am I a moron? No, so I negotiate away part of my salary, or my healthcare, to have the nicer car.
Future 2:
You get heated seats on certain luxury car brands as long as you have an American Express platinum. Just like airport lounge access.
I'd bet on Future 2.
They're both dystopian.
But I can also totally see situations where if the choice is between say....a Ford Mondeo or a BMW 3-series, the company can go "you can get the BMW, but we're not paying anything for options - if you want them, that's on you".
>>Eight months later I'm looking at moving to another company and I'll lose that value. Maybe that affects my decision.
If it's a subscription, then that value is lost anyway. You can probably get a partial refund for the unused months before you return the car.
Another poster said it's a $300 one-time payment. So you're losing that when you leave. Figure on a bunch of options and it's a lot of money.
I'd want it tied to me, not the vehicle. I paid for heated seats on my last BMW. You're charging me again? For DLC?
If I could pay for heated seats forever I could see it. It's just software, you're putting the same seats in every car, now we have a value.
So of course that will never happen.
Heated seats are a pretty standard upgrade that people will pay for, so I'm not sure that it makes much difference whether it's a physical upgrade or a software unlock, and there are valid reasons Tesla might choose a software unlock.
But charging a subscription fee on heated seats on a non-rental car is outrageous.
Does the 1000 USD upgrade buy the feature or merely enable it for the time that the owner owns the car?
However, I still see selling features as a software upgrade strictly as an alternative means* of selling upgrades. So the upgrade should be tied to the car, not the owner. The added bonus here would be that a second owner could unlock features that the initial owner didn't want.
*i.e. Tesla might decide it's better just to put the heated seats in all cars rather than manufacturing cars with and without.
On the current Model 3 SR+, the rear seats are not heated, but you can pay to have the software unlock them. Its a few hundred dollars, I think.
For both the Model 3 LR and the Y LR, there is an available one time $2k USD upgrade to provide enhanced acceleration.
And obviously, the "FSD" package is a software fee that generally requires no hardware changes. It does get you access to some new hardware, though if needed.
But I think people see this differently if it is a one time fee vs a subscription fee.
So what exactly is the problem here?
Isn't having the choice between several options a good thing from consumer point of view? Isn't extracting more money a whole point of company to exist?
I suppose I have an ideological problem with cars being sold this way. I see them as something that you own entirely once you paid for them. The idea that the car physically has heated seats installed but you can't switch them on without paying a fee to BMW is literally offensive to me on some higher level.
I don't know how to explain this better, I just don't want to live in a world where we buy things but never actualy own them. Yes, I am aware that computers and their software has operated like this for a long time now - doesn't mean that I accept this in cars.
>>Isn't having the choice between several options a good thing from consumer point of view?
To use another example - imagine if property developers built only 6-bed houses to streamline their construction process, but 4 out of these bedrooms were walled up and inaccessible by default. But hey, don't worry, you can pay an annual fee to the developer to unlock these bedrooms! Surely that's great for customers, because you only pay for what you need. Kid moved out to college and you no longer need their bedroom? Stop paying the extra fee, some guys will come over and brick up the door again. Isn't consumer choice great?
My point is - consumer choice isn't always the best outcome for everyone, including consumers. And I believe this is a false choice anyway, because BMW isn't aiming to offer this as a $500 one-time unlock OR $100 annual fee - it's just the annual subscription. Just like you can't just buy a standalone copy of Photoshop anymore, it's been replaced with a subscription model entirely.
>>Isn't extracting more money a whole point of company to exist?
I mean, it can be, but in a capitalist competitive market hopefully there will be competition that doesn't do that - and if it actively turns people away from buying BMW products then this whole idea fails at its intended purpose - can't extract more money from your customers if people don't become your customers in the first place.
Do the math and see how using AWS just doesn't make sense at the scale most companies operate.
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 comparison be made.
However as all developers are AWS experts (at least according to their resume), you have to pay that price regardless
No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc.
The person working with a rented service infrastructure can focus on what makes them money: the process.
With self-owned hardware you need contingency plans, setup, maintenance, redundant ISPs, UPS, extra electrical setup (many offices automatically turn off power to all outlets after office hours to safe electricity and reduce the risk of fires), and much more depending on the required tasks and their importance.
If you want to know what happens if you cheap out on that because "it just works" anyway once it's been set up and operated by an underqualified and overworked person, look no further than the recent ransomware incidents.
Some of them could've been easily avoided had the IT infrastructure been up to snuff. Way too many businesses and public entities still treat IT as a necessary evil that can be handled casually, not realising their dependence on it.
The specifics differ on a case-to-case basis, but in general it's a terrible idea for a small non-IT business to operate their own IT infrastructure. The solution doesn't have to be "cloud" or SaaS either. Hiring a competent 3rd party to deal with the specific implementation and operation for you is just as good even said party is "Bob's Business IT Services" and not AWS or Microsoft Azure.
> No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc.
> The person working with a rented service infrastructure can focus on what makes them money: the process.
No, that's just not even remotely true. VMs, managed services all require updates that are pushed to the end user of the service. Downtimes happen, and dealing with those are pushed to the end user of the service by cloud providers far too often. I have countless support tickets at all levels of the cloud stack of back-and-forth on issues, many as simple as "how about serving 200s, not 500s?"
I wish managed services were a rainbows and unicorns world of "I give you cash, you give me magic computer thing that scales and never goes down" … but that just isn't the case today for many cloud services. (I think about the one service I'd be willing to pin such a medal on is S3. It comes remarkably close, but even there, I've had an incident where we had an outage due to S3 that took much back & forth with support to finally get an engineer on their side to look at it.)
When I say "No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc." I don't mean these things don't need to happen at some point. The idea is that it's not you, as in the customer, who's responsible for this.
If I book a Redis-DB of a given size, I don't have to care about its software version, proxies, what OS it's running on, how big the VM is, what the specs are, and so forth. That's what I'm getting at.
It's far higher level than individual VMs and it doesn't mean downtimes don't happen either. It simply means it's not you, the customer, who has to troubleshoot and fix them.
And what I'm getting at is that you do. While there might exist managed services that don't require this, many managed services nonetheless do. E.g., AWS RDS regularly has updated versions, and it is somewhat up to the customer to schedule them & apply them, and downtime happens during that. RDS is relatively pain-free, and is higher on my list of "would use again" for that reason. But take something like Azure AKS: it's a "managed" service, but upgrades are very much not pain free. I have to manually schedule them, and manually apply them, and deal with fallout (which is often, IME).
> It simply means it's not you, the customer, who has to troubleshoot and fix them.
Again, I disagree. When S3 had its outage, I had to debug why certain requests weren't happening, I had to capture sufficient request IDs to prove to AWS that S3 was in an outage for us, and only then did we get the proper support, and eventually, attention from engineering. My company had to pay an engineer to do that. Sure, I'm not literally debugging S3 actual, but that doesn't mean an engineer isn't needed on the consuming side. Same story with an example with ACR where we were receiving 500s: it took not only capturing 5xx requests & their time of occurrence, it took multiple back and forths to convince Azure that the 5xxs were on their side. (Both of these incidents also demonstrated a real fundamental lack of alerting on the side of the companies managing these services. Our monitors on their services very clearly indicated outage. S3's excuse was that it was "just" our bucket. But the point is that they have no insight into the actual service the end user is perceiving even after the customer raises the support ticket.)
Just recently I was SSHed onto an AKS VM to try to help Azure understand why packets weren't making it from their Virtual network into AKS. Data, from one Azure service to another! (And we didn't figure it out, either; we ended up changing what we were doing anyways, and so the investigation became moot.) And this demonstrates another issue I've hit, a bunch, is that interactions between managed services are also impossible to debug: you end up with two separate services both claiming it isn't them that is out of spec, but nonetheless the end result doesn't work, and nobody on either side has the competence to actually debug the problem.
If you want the downtime to end, it becomes you, the customer that has to debug & troubleshoot these things. And that is a cost that must be accounted for when weighing managed services vs. unmanaged ones.
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 of for the 99% of uses.
But the number sounds a bit off… I have fuzzy memories of some fun around that many concurrent requests with Apache 1.3 — that is, one process per user. Doesn't the fun begin quite a bit higher with just any more modern software?
You tell me, I'm not a sysadmin:) I can only attest to the fact that without any kind of RAID or suitable hardware setup (RAM for caching, fast networking etc.), even a dozen people accessing the same file can be very problematic (provided the file is large enough).
As for the use case: digital content creation comes to mind. Sharing assets globally especially in times like these when more people are working remotely is such use case.
Now it isn't cheap, but the five year ownership cost difference compared to iron doesn't cover a month of my salary, so.
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.
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.
Really? There is a giant population of senior experienced engineers looking to do basic a lot of basic sys admin stuff? And they're willing to work for peanuts, right?
By the way, I totally agree with your basic point. The developer probably downloaded some images from a random public repo. As you say, far too many devs think security is someone else's problem and then get upset when the security person blocks their app going into production.
It also doesn't account for all of the out-of-hours stuff we need to do. Even with a hosted solution and a lot of paid-for services like Cloudflare, we still have to check out every unusual error email, everything that seems out of the ordinary.
If you are 200+ people, great, you probably already have a team to manage this. If you are small like 90% of companies then you won't and I want to spend my time on the things I am expert in.
While that's certainly true, I think you missed the part where the guy specifically applied for a DevOps position.
The "Ops"-part wasn't optional and exposing a test system to the public in the first place is a big fail in and of itself obviously.
But that's besides the point: the point was that operating even a single server is more complex than many people tend to admit and you just confirmed this statement.
I also don't understand how you jump from "it's not hard" and "big scary nothing" to "funded startups" and getting a "different team" preferably consisting of knowledgeable "grey beards". Which is it? Is it simple enough to learn on a rainy weekend or do you actually need dedicated trained and/or experienced professionals, because far too many devs are unsuitable for this?
I have trouble following your train of thought tbh.
If it were so basic, the DevOps person they hired should've been able to do it after taking a 6-7 hour docker course.
Speaking from someone who moved a SaaS operation from co-lo to AWS. Everyone (especially the C-suite) was much happier.
Everything from buying the HDD, to his hours to the parking ticket at the data-center. He convinced me and the point was clear: a single failing HDD would costs us more than renting similar computing power for over 6 years. We had two such failing HDDs in three years prior.
That is assuming businesses are content with only getting the same revenue in the new pricing model and before you factor in issues like “people can’t count money” and “pretty much anything can get gradually normalized, and an undercutter’s market pretty much everything will”. For example, I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I wanted to buy a TV right now... Probably buy a normal underpriced surveillance node and spend the time to isolate it from public networks, but still, that’s depressing.
But if it can be turned off and I can just drive as today as with a normal car, and I'm not paying any extra for the idle feature set, where's the problem?
With the current state of autonomous driving, I'd never use it anyway. No feature I've read about is good enough to just sleep in the backseat. Expecting the driver to be 90%+ idle then, when the "autopilot" fails and I must get instantly up to speed on the full context and state of the car, is both a recipe for disaster and would make me a very nervous driver/passenger (especially when I know that it would fail to recognize things like a semi-truck parked sideways across the road or a lane-splitting concrete barrier dead-ahead).
When and if a true and trustworthy autopilot is available, I'd likely prefer a per hour charge. I'd use it only when I really needed it, such as when I really need the time to keep working on this commute, or I'm really tired and think it's safer to be driven home.
As long as there is variety available in the market, this seems like a find option to have. At some point, when I find myself using it a lot, then it's time to go out and buy a car like a Tesla where it's just included as a package. Of course, if VW are smart, they'll also offer a single-price or monthly fee 'Full-Time Self-Drive' package, so I don't need to go to a competitor to get it.
OTOH, if the industry starts to look like internet security cameras or thermostats, where the there is nothing but a subscription, or televisions where there is almost no way to just get a non-'connected' monitor, I'm totally with you -- this would be a horrible example of exploitative, extractive, rent-seeking corporate behavior.
Keep in mind this is a German taking to a German magazine, US business model might be different (But probably not)
At least you still have a choice. In the software world, this freedom of choice is coming to an end, with Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk and many others discontinuing "pay once own forever" products.
Philips is already planning to offer "Light as a service" to consumers. Citing circularity concerns, after all the incentive is now on them to make lightbulbs last as long as possible rather than as short as possible.
But really it means they've been cheating us with planned obsolescence for years.
I really don't want to be dependent on monthly contracts for every little thing. Never. I spend 20 euros per year on lightbulbs and I have a lot of smart ones. I'm sure any subscription plan won't be that cheap. Because the whole point of subscription models is for the company to make lots of money while doing nothing.
No fuel/electricity
No road tax
No insurance
No maintenance
Of course with the pandemic commuting is not a big time sink anymore but I wonder how permanent this will be.
Does this average perhaps count people who aren't working as having zero commute?
There are plenty of other use cases that fit really nicely, replacing a taxi for a night out, occasional long journeys, times when you’re feeling too tired to drive.
But having said that, I don’t see why we wouldn’t just expect to go autonomous all the time. Free or included in the price autonomous driving would be an obvious opportunity for any competitors.
Insurance Fuel/charging Excise tax Parking Maintenance Cleaning
And most importantly, the hassel to deal with the above.
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 large unread personal collection is common vanity spend people usually do, which is really a waste of resources.
Many people rent camera/lens when they need them instead of buying expensive gear which is rarely used , these are efficiencies that are good to have.
Not all renting is bad
Yes, but there are things like car or house that are used daily
Private ownership of land doesn't work because land value goes up even with no input of the land owner.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Everybod...
You are free to own the house and car.
but this happens to other rare objects as well (value goes up without input from the owners), why is land so targeted?
My take is that _everything_ should be ownable, and owned. For example, if someone owned the air you breath, then you would have to pay to breath it. But it would also give incentive for this owner to stop pollution of the air - after all, you would not pay to breath polluted air! So the problem of air pollution is solvable this way.
There are real world examples of this. Internet, tap water, etc.
Your philosophy doesn't seem very well thought out.
At least, with VW system, you pay when you use it. Doesn't work in your area, you don't pay. And if you realize that you can't pay, you can simply drive, your car won't turn into a brick.
And of course it is to extract more money from consumers, that's the goal of every company. But personally I find VW approach more honest than Tesla's. The best would be to offer working self driving out of the box, with no promises and no recurring fees, but the reality is that we don't have the tech yet.
Note that I don't have anything against the $10k package from Tesla except for the way it is advertised. If they just sold you an advanced supercruise, there would be no problem. But they also sell you the idea that your car will fully drive itself in the future and that you are making an investment. Kind of like a Kickstarter, except it is a trillion dollar company, not a bunch of people in a basement.
"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 more than 10k upfront (because they expect to extract this payment every time, all the time, for the entire lifetime of the car).
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 marginal cost becomes the actual cost.
(Of course self driving is years away so this is all just spin)
The used car market is a $150bn industry. A quick spot check found that a 2010 Honda Civic still costs between $5k and $10k depending on mileage, etc.
By the time that self driving is required by the NHSA or whatever body requires backup cameras and the like in new cars self driving will be standard.
A $20k Subaru will come with it out of the box, no add ons, just like a backup camera today.
The National Driver's Association will arise with bumper stickers: "You can pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead hands"
As self driving becomes common, people won't bother with getting a driving license. States that do can actually put in decent levels of restrictions and competency to get one rather than letting an 16 year old with 5 minutes driving round a car park out on the road.
As fewer people get new licesnse, the demand for self-driving goes down as people who can drive the legacy way die off.
This type of change isn’t instant, but it can happen faster than a human lifespan. Think about someone born in the 70s and what they’ve experienced with cigarettes. They were born into a world where close to half the US population smoked, and they’re now retiring in a world where smoking is de facto banned in most non-residential buildings. That is a drastic change, and remember that tobacco is addictive, which hampers change much more effectively than habits like driving.
That rules out de facto driving ban. That leaves driving ban by fiat. Also never gonna happen in this century, unless it carves out an exception for "classic cars."
As far as hazard ratios go, cigarette smoking is orders of magnitude more dangerous than driving. Not a good comparison.
I’m not, you didn’t read what I wrote. I specifically predicated my theory on if it was possible, and indicated my reservations there.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
They do not! Are you comparing computer driving in "easy" situations with human driving in all situations?
If we can get rid of, or vastly reduce, the problems of inattention, exhaustion, rage, chemical impairments and the like, we have a huge improvement. I think that improvement is vastly more, cost measured in human life, than the problems we see with computer control in odd situations.
So yes. They do drive better than humans. The fact that their failings are wack-doodle to us (you drove _right_ into that truck??) is swallowed in the fact that their failings are profoundly fewer than ours.
Better start showing off some statistics along with that claim.
But the big benefit that I see of self-driving is that a lot of manual driving becomes safer. Autonomous vehicles won't overlook motorcycles and Miatas.
Autonomous cars will go a long way to making small, fun vehicles safe again.
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.
See this thread with the math: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166
The future you are expecting is never going to happen.
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 the reliability of human drivers (and can last much longer continuously than humans do).
I don't understand what you mean. I'm comparing actual time behind the wheel - hours of correct driving vs hours (well minutes) of incorrect driving.
Do the math yourself, take total hours behind the wheel and divide by the accident rate, like I did. You'll get the same results. Depending on your assumptions anywhere from 99.999 to 99.99999% correct driving by humans.
> Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly.
Again, I'm not comparing constantly, I'm comparing actual hours behind the wheel.
That number also means no situations where the computer gives up and hands control back to the driver.
If autonomous cars can never hand back (at most stopping legally, safely and out of traffic) and cause 1 death per 10 million hours, that would seem about right.
[0] https://www.volpe.dot.gov/news/how-much-time-do-americans-sp...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
> We can't can't even keep a computer up and running that well
That's the comparison that I quoted in my comment and that I was responding to. You're comparing continuous uptime to humans' disconnected (and brief) bouts of driving.
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 I don't know how well the analogue holds up if they don't have equivalent levels of quality oversight currently.
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.
I am legitimately asking how much parity there is regarding oversight regulation between flight and autonomous software, which would help make your point clearer since it has a direct relationship to reliability.
However, I do think it’s relevant to the point. If you are making an analogy about reliability but one is legally forced to demonstrate reliability while the other is not, does that comparison really make sense with that additional context? While I've worked in the aerospace software domain, I don't know to what standard AV is held which is why I was asking.
Not quite attacking, but disagreeing with an implied assumption that I didn't make (ie, that I was arguing that AVs were ready for primetime instead of narrowly disputing the flawed reliability comparison in the parent comment).
> I am legitimately asking how much parity there is regarding oversight regulation between flight and autonomous software, which would help make your point clearer since it has a direct relationship to reliability
The reason I figured it was rhetorical is that I thought it was fairly universally known that there's no comparable regulatory apparatus for AVs (yet?). But you're mistaken that this is relevant to my point: the parent comment was discussing the feasibility of AVs by saying "we can't build computers with the uptime of human drivers", and I was pointing out that he had this backwards.
> If you are making an analogy about reliability but one is legally forced to demonstrate reliability while the other is not, does that comparison really make sense with that additional context?
I didn't say AVs were as reliable as aircraft software, nor that they would definitely get to that pt (perhaps they don't need to, as safe stops are much easier on the ground). I was disputing the claim that computer system uptime can't be made as reliable as humans in the current day, using aircraft systems as an in-production example.
My point was that AV-aircraft comparison is only valid iff they are held to the same quality standard. It sounds like we agree they are not.
I think it’s important to include that caveat, that’s all. If you assume everybody already knows that, I can understand why you didn’t include it in your original point.
It's enough to have "on/off" somewhere in settings, and have it "enabled" even if you don't use it.
Good grief, there are countless articles even here on HN about dark patterns where people are tricked into subscribing to something, or being unable to unsusbcribe except when going through the hoops. But sure, a car manufacturer charging maney for a subscription will never ever do that as long as you "don't use a feature".
Pay-per-minute autonomous driving is far more like old pay-per-minute phone plans than it is mystery-AWS-data-charges. You know when it's driving and when it's not. There's no unforeseeable per-lambda charges about it.
It's not a huge logical leap to think that a subscription based service like this could lead to things such as:
You want to travel between point A and B several miles apart in rural Kansas on a straight road with a road density of 2 vehicles per mile? "Sure, that's 8.50 an hour."
Oh, you want to travel between Newark and Manhattan in the middle of a snowstorm? "That will be 15 an hour because we have to cover the costs for the real-time feed of data from our weather and control center"
Oh, you have a camper, too? "That's an additional 2 bucks an hour for our towing package"
Oh, you're traveling across state lines and the state over imposes an additional tax on autonomous driving. "we need to charge you 8.75 to cover the tax and our costs but only in that state."
Ah yes. There's no evidence. Except the countless instances of dark patterns everywhere on the web tricking into you paying money. Countless instances where you can't cancel a subscription, and have to go through multiple hoops to do it. Countless instances when there's a runaway billing in a SaaS that leaves people with huge bills.
But sure. These are all just "hypotheticals", and not the reality how the absolute vast majority of subscription business works.
> You know when it's driving and when it's not. There's no unforeseeable per-lambda charges about it.
Ah yes. Because of course it will be as simple as "when it's on, it will be charged", and not "when an obscure setting is on, you will be charged, regardless of whether it will be self-driving or not".
I don't own a car currently (nor any Tesla stock) so I'm happy to wait and see if I'm wrong or right.
But we'll see.
Mobileye's camera based point cloud approach appears to be much more robust.
Good point though. I'd like Tesla to add more cameras.
I have a 2020 Hyundai, and there has been no major refresh in the 2021 or 2022 models of the same car. But the software features have each gotten slightly better. The cruise control will only slow down and stop you on my model, but on the newer model, it will stop and then start going again. My model will sometimes correct the steering at the last minute if I start veering outside the lane, the newer model will more gradually keep you centered in the lane so you don’t even start to veer out. Pretty minor stuff like that.
There’s no way the hardware on my car is the limiting factor, but I will never get any of these improvements. Tesla is still the only car maker to decide that car software can be treated like almost any other software people use, and actually updated independently of the hardware.
Even if the 10k self driving charge is a little too ambitious, in my opinion Tesla are still miles ahead of all the other major brands in user-friendly practices.
It’s always interesting that people get so used to the status quo even if it’s actually inefficient or wasteful or arbitrarily worse than it easily could be. But if a company does something ambitious and new, but it has some downsides like a higher cost in the beginning, those downsides get judged so much more harshly than the downsides of the status quo.
I'm not sure why you'd make that assumption. The newer models that can do more may very well have more/better sensors, faster processor(s), more RAM, etc. Just because the interior and exterior look the same doesn't mean that everything else is the same too.
The idea of a car you bought being updated new features from the manufacturer down the road didn't even exist until Tesla. The legacy car manufacturers can't just turn on a dime and start doing the same thing for many reasons, ranging from accounting and contractual issues to actual technological ones.
None of it is as simple as it may seem.
You also won't have any features removed, like Tesla has also pioneered.
OTAs are great when they add features. They suck when they remove/alter ones you previously liked.
On my 2017 VW, this enhancement was merely a feature flag waiting for the customer to enable using VCDS/OBDeleven. It's an amazing difference!
Another good one I found and enabled is lane change assist, which makes it so that when you're on cruise control but slower than your set point (due to tailing a slow lead car) putting your turn signal on will immediate begin the acceleration that otherwise would only occur once you have completed the lane change and are no longer impeded by a slow lead car, so you're better matched with the flow of the new lane as you start entering it.
VCDS and OBDeleven are essentially emulators of the factory scan tools that only VW dealerships normally have. Way, way beyond OBDII code reading.
No it isn't. We don't have companies so that they can extract money from consumers. We have companies to help efficiently distribute wealth through the community to maximise the probability of social needs being filled.
If the goal was to extract money from consumers and give it to those with spare capital, there are vastly more efficient ways to do that. Why would they even bother producing valuable goods?
Have you had a look at the healthcare industry in the US vs healthcare in the rest of the world?
Like opium by the East India company or drugs by mexican cartels?
Getting people to buy something is a lot easier than chasing them with a gun, just look at how bad we are at colecting taxes.
"We have companies to help efficiently distribute wealth"
There is no economic theory, from marxist to neoliberal, that claims conpanies are there to distribute wealth. They organise capital and labour, and maybe they fullfill needs, unless they are doing HFT or something similarly murky.
90% of the time, people start companies to make money, not to "efficiently distribute wealth through the community."
> We have companies to help efficiently distribute wealth through the community to maximise the probability of social needs being filled.
We here presumably means society in general. We set rules and give privileges to people to run companies in order to better society. In a capitalist system this is done through the medium of 'enlightened self interest' so yes, one starts a company to make money but that is not the reason we have companies.
You are arguing against a point he didn't make.
I don't understand this at all. The reason people create companies is the reason that companies exist. They're by definition the same thing - companies don't exist without people creating them. So if people start companies to make money, the reason companies exist is to make the people who start them money.
Not really, because “company” is a generic term for any organization of people with a common business purpose independent of whether it has a distinct recognized legal recognition, existence, or treatment separate from the constituent individuals.
A corporation, LLC, or other legally recognized business entity requires a legal framework.
This isn't really true. A company doesn't include the employees of the company, not the way I used it and not the way the parent used it. So it doesn't refer to a generic term for any organisation of people with a common business purpose. It really only refers to those which have some category of legal framework.
That's not true, though - the non-legal definition of a company is "a commercial business."
You can absolutely have a commercial business without a legal framework for it. People engaged in work and trade well before anyone wrote up a legal framework for companies.
I think this is a very optimistic take. We are already seeing the industry push out subscriptions for features like Ford's Blues Cruise. The costs are low now, but obviously they can go up.
I'd be really surprised if VW doesn't start pushing something similar well before they have anything approaching L5 autonomy.
It isn't too crazy either, as these advanced features are already useful.
You already said it's 31 minutes of commuting per day, so why are you doubling it in your subsequent calculation?
Every company will try to extract money from their customers and market normally decides who is correct.
I see cost optimalisation for some people and none for most.
If the passenger should be doing the updates to the AI, then they should own the car outright and have the right to repair it.
If it is VW, then VW should align incentives well towards software maintenance by charging either an hourly or a monthly rate.
The reason this service can potentially exist is only because Tesla is charging such a high upfront cost, and because it may be more accessible (or indeed cheaper) for some people to rent on a pay-as-you-go basis.
"This is 100% a way to extract more money from consumers" is true of literally everything that every corporation does. That's the point of its existence.
Are they spinning it to sound good? Of course, that's part of the job. Do you have to take the service if it provides no additional benefit to you? No, you can still buy a Tesla (or not).
Self-driving is going to be a service. It'll never be "done". Let's be very clear about this.
So what's actually is happening is Tesla charges you for something it can't give you yet, and something that will require ongoing maintenance i.e. you'd be paying a subscription in the long run again (just wait and see).
VW just starts with the right model from the get go and doesn't set you back $10K on empty promises.
Who is "completely disingenuous" here?
Or if the car costs 20k, plus 10k surcharge it is more like 13 years until the rent reaches the price. Also what about insurance and maintainence?
1) The driver's time. If I can read on my way to work, that's a win. Price effectively reduced.
2) Time saved not getting an oil change, new tires, other maintenance, etc. Price drops a bit more.
3) I don't have to buy a "family sized" car that's only fully utilized a small percentage of the time. That over-pay / under-realized has a cost associated with it. Instead, I simply hail what I need when I need it.
4) Along the same lines as #1, family QT increases when I use a family vehicle.
5) When I'm able to rightly size my vehicle, there are eco savings as well.
6) Or perhaps I'm too old to drive and owning a car doesn't make sense either. If someone else has to shuttle me around, their time is a cost.
Again. I agree. Companies profit from some products and markets more than others. That said, these vehicles and biz models are not the past and can - and will? - change the future.
If you're buying a VW...alreaady a heft sum, tacking on some added fee and saying that it's disadvantageous the disadvantaged feel like a stretch.
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.
It's clear that the autonomous driving has to execute locally on the car, so there is no physical basis to any "cost saving" other than sales mechanism optimization. Boo.
In the medium run, like GPS technology, competition will drive the cost of autonomy down to practically nothing and it will be enjoyed by working class people for free.
Not to get into hourly wages, but it doesn't sit right when X% of your day is spent simply paying off your ride to work.
How on earth is charging more money for a lower upfront cost "extortion"? If you remove the option, you're not magically granting people the upfront cost, you're just cutting them off from access at all. Are you not aware of the time value of money?
Just because it isn't economical for the "average" consumer doesn't mean there isn't a large and profitable niche.
Over the course of last 7 years living in NY I paid for rentals + uber + taxis way more than if I just bought a car in the beginning. Yet I'm going to buy a car anyway, it's simply too much hassle.
First, the subscription model means that VW has an incentive to maintain the feature. Ofc, Tesla has been very generous with updates so far (even to older models!) but the key word is 'generous.' Once you've paid 10k (or more in the future) they have your money and you are at their mercy.
You're correct that, if you wanna self-drive everywhere, the subscription will eventually be a bad deal. But I think Tesla's approach actually keeps a lot more people from taking advantage than VW - because $10k is a lot of money! $8.50/hr is pretty reasonable for, say, a couple that wants to make out on their way to dinner or a parent who needs to keep their kids from fighting. These people don't self drive everywhere, but the option to pay for a bit of self driving is nice.
Or, to put it another way, whether or not Tesla's 10k charge is taking advantage of consumers "less" is based on usage and follow-through. You need a little over 1,000 hours of self-driving to get that 10k charge down to below VW's price of $8.50/hr and Tesla has said the $10k is gonna go up. So if you buy it and you ever stop using it within the first ~4.5 years, you are spending more compared to VW.
Whether they actually have the deep technical expertise to implement a FSD worth paying 8/hour for remains to be seen. They seem to also be copying Musk’s aggressive timelines.
Tesla is WAY further away from fully autonomous driving than they're letting on to their customers, probably because a lot of people would demand refunds on their FSD charges if they knew there was a good chance it wouldn't arrive before the car's end of life in the best case.
Volkswagen's plan here is just as ridiculous. Autonomous driving is economically impossible to make work on a pay-as-you-go model. Who's going to front the cost for all the tech required in the car to allow for automated driving? Volkswagen? the customer?
What if the customer doesn't want automated driving - they're not going to just give you an extra few tens of thousands of dollars for a feature they don't want and would still need to pay extra for anyway.
If VW eats the cost then they'll go out of business making crazy expensive cars that people won't pay to reimburse. (Are you going to pay $8 for every small run in the car anytime you need to go to the shop for something?)
Just copy Waymo and Uber in terms of model (i.e. robotaxi) if you're going to do automated driving. At least that way the cars are consistently in use and generating revenue to cover their eye-watering BOM cost.
If VW had:
1) a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles. (2) running for years gathering training data. (3) all over the world.
They would still have a really long way to go to catch up with Tesla - who are still (according to their recent statements to regulators) not even close.
We ought wait until they manufacture them then ban import and hope they go bankrupt.
I am sure many people would opt to not use it most of the time, but having the option is great. As long as not using the option does not make the car a worse car than an non-automomuous one.
I feel most negative comments are coming from the dark-pattern aspect of it. How transparent is the charge going to be, are people going to be trapped in bills (yearly subscription outlasting their actual car-ownership) they wont be able to afford?
I also think that if few people use the feature regularly, but all cars need to have the hardware to support the autonomous driving, everybody is going to essentially overpay for features they are not using. Because one way or another VW needs to break even on the hardware at least.
Therefore, I think it could be an amazing business model if the promises of SaaS are fulfilled, a product that constantly improves and that you only pay for when you use it. In this case the incentives of customers and VW are aligned.
I think what people are afraid of, are dark patterns, subscription bundles and general in-transparency make the car a lot more expensive than people bought into.
Also, I expect there will be a service component whereby mapping a models are updated regularly so some fee for that makes sense.
Then what if insurance was covered in that fee?
No.... I'm assuming we build that and design cities to be walkable and bike-able instead of just optimizing for car traffic.
We can just build effective and efficient public transportation, maintain some of our current roads (so you can still have a car) and build cities and towns to be walkable and bike-able.
> How do you do those things without driving?
Idk. How do people all over the world do it today?
I typically walk. I take buses or trains if I need to go further than walking distance, which is fairly rare.
> Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation?
That's usually what you'd build to get rid of cars, yes.
It's not, if you build correctly. It's only "faster" when you spread things out into suburbia.
Is it faster for you to get in your car and drive next door or to just walk over there?
Of course its faster to walk.
Walking is faster.
You can't just say "driving is faster" without qualifications.
> your car is available virtually 24/7
So are your legs. Walk and bike.
I don't see the relevance of many of these other items you mention. Who cares if you can personalize your car? I'm not saying cars should be banned, but we should stop optimizing for them at the expense of everything else, especially when they aren't necessary.
Edit: I'll note that many of them will take the subway during rush hour if both ends of the trip are within a couple of blocks of the subway. However, if there is a transfer they won't, the subway becomes time inefficient very quickly if you have to walk far from it or wait for multiple trains.
I would prefer it if the congestion charges were scaled to usage rates for that reason (example, you can enter the toll zone once per month for free, but if you do it 20 times the toll eventually ends up being $100+ per journey). It seems more fair to me especially since a lot of people occasionally need to haul a box or something to Midtown, but don't usually contribute to traffic congestion.
I also am willing to bet if you compared "everybody walk" vs "everybody drive" walking would win out by a large margin in Manhattan.
Flying a private jet is faster than taking a Southwest Airlines flight too...
Here's a walkable and bike-able neighborhood in Columbus. There's a mix of houses, businesses, and apartments (it's mostly single-family homes). https://api.trekaroo.com/system/photos/229733/original/11943...
Why can't we just build more of that?
Sure some people can live in the middle of nowhere and take their car everywhere, but you're crazy to think that most people can afford to do that. It's just not going to work. We see it fracturing right now.
-edit-
But anyway, we don't really have options now and the things we are doing are completely stupid. There's no way we can just keep building suburbs, strip malls, and highways and have everybody drive a car and it's dumb to even want to do that.
If I add in:
- I have children
- Temperatures range from -15C to +5C to -15C on the same day, and same outing
=> I need to pack backup clothing for the children in case they get wet in the +5 weather, and backup snow winter clothing for when it's -15 and they get wet.
=> We aren't talking niceties, a 25kg child exposed to sub zero weather in wet clothing will approach hypothermia and other detrimental conditions quickly.
If I add in:
- physical limitation including breathing (reliant on oxygen), exercise intolerance, amputation, pregnancy, pregnancy induced physical limitations, broken limbs, nerve damage, inner ear disorders due to concussion or older age
=> "So are your legs. Walk and bike." becomes... well, I hope you see.
How do these people in Dinan in Brittany do these things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinan#/media/File:Dinan_on_the...
I don't see highways and suburbs. Why can they do it but we can't?
How about Nantes (if you want a larger city)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantes#/media/File:Ile_de_Nant...
Where are the suburbs and highways and gas stations? Maybe we should ask them how they handle having kids. Do you think they have Ford Explorers?
*Also sorry I know my words are coming off as angry, but I promise it's just passion about a problem I feel very strongly about.
Maybe, depending on traffic. But parking sure as shit isn't.
Public transport on the other hand, is a massive undertaking which involves a lot of politics. So it is not nearly as profitably or incentivized.
I would personally like to see public transportation improved over cars, but I may be in the minority like you.
People have the same mentality around electric cars and range. They'll say, well I can't have an electric car because if I go on this road trip that I might do 3 days out of the year my electric car won't be able to handle that. But 99% of the time it covers your use cases...
I know this is a losing battle though. We won't build public transportation, bike lanes, or sidewalks. There's little doubt that we'll ever do that. It's just frustrating that we're so intent on just driving everywhere, spending 45 minutes each way in a car, thousands of teenagers dying, vast amounts of pollution, an untold number of habitats destroyed, pavement and concrete everywhere, and it's just because we decided that every family should live in the suburbs and drive everywhere. There's no good reason. It's insanity.
Most Americans won't even entertain the thought of giving up their car even if alternative modes of transport make more sense.
Is it really that difficult? I often assume this difficulty comes from real world situation where you have human drivers on the same street and people walking pass.
What if none of these are problems. And all cars in the X state have to be AV Lv4?
Hard to be racist when your neighbor is black. A lot easier to do it while you scroll Facebook algorithms on your autonomous 45 minute drive to an office.
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 <any vehicle>". 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.
Those long 4-6 hour drives we do only a few times a year for vacations or whatever. Totally worth it IMHO if it is 100% hands-off.
I usually prefer to own my stuff than rent, but I don't think paying 10k upfront for something I only use sporadically is worthwhile so this seems great to me.
The general inconveniences of long distance drives like planning food and toilet stops, or delays due to traffic, weather or accidents would still be present.
I would pay a lot to be instantly transported to my holiday destination, but almost nothing to get there in the same time with someone else driving me.
If you like to drive, you are fine with or without autonomous cars. If you don't like to sit in a car for 5 hours, you are SOL in both cases. Only if you hate driving, but do enjoy sitting in a car not driving do self-driving cars add value.
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 do you program the car to do?
Aside: Will walking into traffic become the next train surfing thrillseeking? (PS: Movie reference, Intacto.)
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 experiment as real as possible, which is completely useless in practice. Comments like this give ethics a bad image and turn it into a sad joke.
Here is a real ethical dilemma: Early adoption of autonomous vehicles will cause deadly accidents during the development phase but the deployment of autonomous vehicles will save lives over the long term.
Should we accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles and accept early deaths in exchange for saving more people by deploying life saving autonomous driving earlier?
Should we delay the development of autonomous vehicles by two decades to avoid early deaths while letting people drive themselves and suffer an increased accident rate for 20 years that will ultimately cost more lives than the development of autonomous vehicles?
Tesla is following the first option. They are deploying technology that isn't ready to speed up the rate of progress.
Waymo is following the second option. Stay safe during development, even if it takes much longer for your product to actually decrease the fatality rate.
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.
Disclaimer: after last year accident I had to say adios to motorcycles probably forever, so driving for me would suck no matter the vehicle; it just has too many wheels. When one enjoys driving, the better Tesla/whatever model just can't be on par even with the crappiest motorcycle. Car lovers can't understand.
Sad thing is that people will and it will become mainstream leaving those like me driving our old clunkers.
Already kind of happening now, most people happy to buy cars with no dip stick for the oil, no spare tire and mostly unrepairable except by the dealer. The rest of us are out in our old Toyotas and Hondas that we are keeping alive as long as possible.
People pay a subscription (data, if not apps) to use their phone. Most people pay at least one subscription in association with the TV they own. I'm wondering if part of this may be the "shock of the new" talking.
Thankfully the oil sensor was one of the few things that didn't fail on my BMW, but ironically my Lexus is the car that actually burns oil so I'm standing out there once every 1000 miles with paper towel wiping my dipstick. Wish we could have both.
I also agree I'd never pay for this subscription (unless I'm drunk and it's legally allowed to drive itself), but I'm probably just going to avoid subscription based vehicles like I already do (like BMWs with their annual CarPlay subscription).
You already have the choice between buying a car outright or taking out a lease. If the unfortunate happens and you can't afford to keep up with the payments on your car, then at some point you're going to have your access to it removed. Maybe not as quickly or as sarcastically as in Ubik, but it will happen.
A subscription fee to update the map I could understand. A subscription fee to be notified of real time event (and have the car automatically chose the fastest route) I can also understand. But for driving itself? No way. That thing has to be done locally for latency reasons, subscription is just dishonest for this one.
If I had a regular commute and self-driving was considerably beyond human competence I'd love to have it, but I don't see either one happening any time soon!
I'd definitely pay a few bucks per hour for my car to drive me to Southern California while I read a book.
I have never been to US, but whenever I hear about self driving cars I think: why don't people just use public transport if they don't want to drive?
But there's no direct way to get from SF/SJ to LA/OC via train. There are buses, but they are considerably less enjoyable than the Pacific Surfliner line!
With your own car you can bring as much stuff as you want, stop where you want, leave when you want, go wherever you want at your destination, bring whoever you want, listen to what you want on the radio, stop where you want for side trips/tourist things along the way etc.
Like for instance with my own car instead of a shared train, I can bring my golf clubs, my dog, and my drone with me, and call my friend on the way out of town to see if he’s up for a spontaneous trip to San Diego to see what fun we could get up to there for the weekend. That’s not really possible on a train/airplane.
It’s just a totally different experience than arriving to a train station with some limited set of your things, possibly being late, then arriving somewhere else again without a car, and having to return again by doing all of this in reverse.
It also means spending time forced to socialize with people you don’t know, and almost definitely in a seat that is less comfortable than the one in your $100k luxury car.
Also, you can get blocked in a traffic jam when you don't want.
US population density is typically low, even in many cities.
This means that any reasonable spending on buses and train routes ends up with relatively infrequent service to places not too close to you.
This is self-reinforcing, too. Everyone taking cars for all trips means you need lots of space for parking and roadways, which spreads things out and makes walking and transit less practical.
It has a terrible rail system if you're a passenger. Connectivity is weak, and even if you have a direct route, almost all the rails are owned by freight lines, so freight traffic gets priority and schedules are rarely met. If you have to make a connection, good luck. There's some exceptional routes in the north eastern US, where there's a lot of rail and some of it is passenger exclusive.
The question is more likely to be flying vs driving than take a train vs driving, because a train will nearly always take longer and be less convenient.
Going to the city near me, I have these options to take two adults and a child:
1. Train - 5 minute walk, 1 hour travelling including a change. Trains run once per hour, costs £16 while my son is under 5.
2. Bus - 25 minute walk (at adult speed), 45 minute travelling each way. Runs every 20 minutes I think, costs ~£8.
3. Drive - 25 minutes travelling each way, no walk. Costs ~£1 in petrol + £2 tolls. Technically costs would be higher if you include wear & tear on the car itself but not by a great deal.
This is probably the least fair comparison to the car as well. Most other places nearby have the same major issues with travelling, or worse. A trip to the beach would be a 10 minute drive with no tolls but the same 25 minute walk to the bus stop and then a slow bus.
Added to this the amount of stuff we may have on us (pram, bag of various things for changes, snacks, lunch, etc). If there's more of us, or once our kid grows up more the costs go up for everything other than the car.
This is self perpetuating: Changes in urban planning that would allow most homes in the US to be good residences without a car would involve not just demolishing most cities and starting over. This isn't even just about demolishing suburbs: Even downtowns are built in ways that optimized for the car. Go to your favorite mapping app, and look at, say, St Louis. You will find many buildings are just parking lots, very few storefronts, very wide streets designed to be driven at 60 km/h, and with very few pedestrian crossings... All the infrastructure that makes it easy for most workers to live 20-30 of wherever they work just makes building a useful public transport system unfeasible for a city, and even more so when most voters would be unable to use it.
The same problem is there in small cities, and even villages. A small town in Italy that lives from summer tourism is going to be easy to deal with even without using public transport, and just walking. The American equivalent is unmanageable without a car.
Those that want to avoid driving in the US end up either paying people to drive for them all the time, or live in the pedestrian friendly parts of a handful of cities. And if you haven't visited the US, you probably also haven't seen how expensive is to live in those areas. So, if anything, it's much easier to live without a car if you are a pretty wealthy tech worker than if you are a server at a restaurant, or work at a retailer. The less your job pays, the harder it is to not drive a car.
Imagine a couple of a bank teller and an insurance agent. If they need to move to Madrid, it's very likely that they will find living arrangements where it's easier to go to work via public transport, as most places do. If you do the equivalent in Houston TX, it's almost guaranteed one of them will have to drive to live a comfortable life, and most likely both.
The US has good train infrastructure for freight (far better than Europe), but rail service is not great. There's no good train route from the SF Bay Area to Southern California. But even if there were, getting around in the LA area practically requires a car, so you'll be renting one at the end of a train journey anyways.
So, the options to get my family down there look like:
* $100 roundtrip flight * 5 of us = $500 plus the cost of renting a car. Annoying airport logistics and luggage, and a few hours of time saved
* ~$300 of wear on vehicle and gas round trip, plus having to drive for 6 hours.
A good train would be something inbetween-- perhaps $30-40/person, but still needing to rent a car. Somewhat easier logistics, but still annoying luggage, etc. Time between that of a flight, etc.
But a self-driving car would take the worst suck out of the driving trip.
I used to work in high-frequency equity trading. We would run simulations against tick-by-tick data from real markets. The simulations were of very questionable value. As soon as you trade once in your simulation, from that point onwards the whole run is contaminated. Your trade, if it had actually happened, would have been seen by other participants, who would have changed their strategy, often in complex and unpredictable ways, and the timelines would have diverged rapidly and irreversibly from that point.
Data recorded from driving situations is useful for one thing - testing out split-second decision making - stop or accelerate? Steer left or right? This is a limited use case. Most situations don't have critical decisions like this. The ones that do, it's often hard to judge what would have been the right answer. Even accidents - where the post facto desired outcome is "don't have an accident", unfold over several seconds, involving several stages of actors responding to each others' actions. No one can be sure how the driver should have approached the very first interaction - the only one for which the data is meaningful.
Actual road testing, and meaningful simulation which isn't just replaying what actually happened is much more useful.
Even they admitted fully autonomous vehicles most likely won't be a thing any time soon (maybe ever if we keep our current infrastructure)
https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...
My father has a self driving enabled Tesla Model S which he paid a hell of a lot of money for that he doesn't have as he's in his 70s, living entirely off the remains of the house he just sold. He's convinced it'll be any day now that he gets full self driving and that it'll change the world. He tells me he loves the car and phones me daily to tell me about it. But at the end of the day there are a bunch of complaints hiding in his words. This covers everything from poor fitting, paint issues, weird bugs, massive safety and computer issues, lots of hidden costs and general battery life issues. He's hiding the true picture which is not the real experience.
Between Tesla marketing and the echo chamber Tesla forums, he's traded his entire cash pile and attention for what I can only describe as a prototype that is a ball and chain which limps between bouts of charging CPR and he can't tell anyone because it might damage his conspicuous virtuous electric car identity.
But Tesla will be introducing self driving any day now he tells me. All the time. For the last 3 years...
I'm not really a proponent or opponent of electric cars. I don't really care about the things as they don't factor into my life past the utility of a screwdriver. I myself drive a third-hand Citroen with a tuk tuk engine in it which was cheap to buy and run and takes me to the shops and for the odd weekend out. But from my vantage point, I can't see the return of investment that such complex technology can add to a simple problem. All it does is make it more complicated, less safe and less reliable while milking people for cash for promises which may never materialise. If there's anything I've worked out over the last couple of decades in the software industry is that this model really doesn't work - it's the marketing and development model that Microsoft uses.
Edit: he literally just phoned me to tell me how wonderful it is again. But it cost him 5% of the battery capacity to cool it down enough that it’s not going to burn his ass off (has sunroof) which means his next journey is going to have to end with a 10 mile detour to sit in a supercharger bay (which where he lives will be busy and he’ll have to wait) and thus probably cost a coffee at the same time.
As someone with similar car, you get to know it’s quirks and use it when it adds value.
And those aren't quirks; they are big stinking problems. Never write down a problem as something that isn't one. I owned a Merc 190E once that was a bag of problems. My life got better and I got happier the day I acknowledged them and got rid of it.
It really doesn't bother me whether it gets better or they add full self driving. Charging your car isn't a big stinking problem, it's an inherent feature.
This seems to be a very 21st century phenomenon; product marketing gets replaced by cult membership. You don't buy a Tesla to experience a great car, you buy Tesla to tell everyone how great the experience is.
And before anyone calls this sad (which it might or might not be), consider that the alternative is either isolation by rejecting all forms of tribalism, or tribes formed around more harmful old school ideas (religious cults, violence-based tribes, tribes based on race/gender/etc.), or tribes we were born into and have no choice to leave because we can’t just buy the services of a farmer, a plumber, or a babysitter and have to rely exclusively on our tribe for those kinds of needs.
It's a worldwide phenomenon that motorcyclists in general wants to be open and inclusive. We wave to each other when we pass on the road, talk when we meet at gas stations and so on. But a Harley is not a motorcycle, it is a Harley. Most don't wave back, all frown if you try to talk to them if not out on your own Harley today but some Japanese bike and so on. Tesla and Apple users are very often in the same category of religious fanaticism for no good reason except brand loyalty. That is sad as one should be able to own a Harley, be part of a Harley crowd and not be religious about it but most (not all!) fall into this trap.
A tribe that is divided because of some businesses PR is always sad and harmful.
Secondary thing is that motorcycling is just a larger and looser consumer tribe than Harley or Yamaha or Ducati riders. Not quite as large as motorcycles + trikes, which is still smaller than bikes, trikes, and scooters. To some degree it is turtles all the way down in terms of how exclusive vs inclusive you want to be.
I personally don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with consumer tribes. The question is how does each one treat its members and newcomers and is it a healthy environment for everyone involved?
I'm guessing you are from the US, which I'm not, but I have never seen this in other bikers no matter the brand. Sure Ducati guys often hang out with eachother at a meet, as do other groups, but it's not like they don't greet other riders.
Heck, I even wave (end get waved at) when I drive my Alfa Romeo by both other Alfa drivers but also people in classic cars (and a few Ducati riders even). Totally different cultures than Harley riders, which I think is sad.
Toyota frames rust out. KitchenAid gears strip (and half the stuff they put their name on is just badged garbage to begin with). Snap On tools break. LL Bean stuff wears our prematurely. Being in a "good school district" fails to magically make your kid successful. The guy with the $2k fishing setup gets out-fished by the teenager with the $40 setup who knows what makes the fish in that spot bite. Fancy pans don't make you a good cook. But yet people do all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify the things they paid top dollar for as still being the best crap ever even when they fail them. Nobody expects stuff made at scale to be perfect 100% of the time but the owners of premium stuff sure act like that is the case.
You see this sort of failure denialism with all sorts of premium products. People actively refuse to believe that something else, something cheaper, could have been equivalent or better for their use case.
Obviously we don't know GP's dad, but that was clearly the intent of GP's post.
I’ve heard more people describe it as “a computer with wheels” than I can remember.
I’m even more sharp with the description. It’s a no brand android tablet with wheels.
My Citroen feels better put together and it’s made of cooking foil.
I mean the worst of this is the Range Rover I hired for a wedding to drive the bride in. Headlights gave out due to an electrical problem with CANbus when I was driving it back to the hire return. Just give me some fuses, switches and relays thanks.
My iPhone has 100x better navigation, media and communications support than anything else I’ve used. So I just slave it to the car with BT. I don’t even use CarPlay because bugs (Ford, Land Rover, Citroen in particular).
Keep the software and hardware separate and keep the hardware simple.
I also bet on simplicity, both because it's much cheaper, and because it gives me less trouble. Fuses, switches and relays, as you say.
I simply don't trust a company who already has my money to maintain a software package on wheels, and I just don't trust software in general.
For the price of a Tesla you should be getting so much more inside especially at the S/X price level. Compared to the Mercs and BMWs I looked at a Tesla was more comparable to a nice Honda.
Look at what BMW offers for an EV. The i3, at $44k base. The i3 is basically a midlevel compact sedan. The Model 3, which you can get for $4k cheaper, is a way better deal IMHO.
But fundamentally the issues are flawed analysis rather than defective implementation.
They are radically different experiences.
From the original description, my suspicion is it’s the regular (i.e. not advanced beta) “full self driving“ package, which I have on my model 3.
Truth is, it’s pretty limited, and you’ve got to learn the types of situations where it will and won’t cope. Through town, situations with parked cars, or weird lane markings, it will struggle.
However, the flipside is that on longer journeys – with mostly open roads, it does very well indeed. I recently did a three+ hour drive and the car drove for probably 80% of that time, and without any issues at all. Once you get used to its foibles and therefore understand when you can trust it, it really is a relaxing experience.
Their marketing, however, is top notch, so whenever Tesla fails to deliver, people conclude that 'all selfdriving must be crap'.
Is there something called 'Law of inhibiting leadership'? In which an underperforming leader of a segment holds back the entire segment?
It has it's quirks but they are easy to get used to and after a few years, I know pretty much exactly where it is extremely reliable and where it will get it wrong.
The behaviour is extremely boringly reliable - which is exactly what it should be and doing a few hundrer km on a good highway is now much much more relaxing than before.
Anyone still believing in fully autonomous cars as they are presented by Musk &co today (the real thing, not a cruise control that only works on California's highways on a sunny day) is 101% delusional.
We'll talk about it in 15 years as the "previous AI hype cycle".
Will it include my auto insurance, since if I'm not driving why am I paying for insurance? If there is an accident will it cover my deductible? If the car get stolen, will it drop the thieves at the police station and come back to me? and others..
If it's just driving me from point A to B, no thanks, I can do that myself.
The way I'd explain it, is both ownership and privacy can be boiled down to some simplified abstract terms to show that society benefits more when they are traded away for convenience or price.
However, in practice and in history, this is not the case, and those tradeoffs almost always result in a worse quality of life and economic standpoint for the individual, and more profit, power, and control for the governments and corporations that took those benefits away from the people.
Meant to initiate some thought, but don't take it too seriously.
I own my home so that I can do what I want with it, and I own my car so that I can take it off road, leave my stuff in it, and work on it.
Rental services are bland as fuck. I can organize my music and movies way better than Spotify and Netflix so that it meets my exact preferences.
No. I don't want to live in the rental economy future, and I find it hard to relate to those that do.
But renting a car that would show up at my door and can drive it self back? Man, that would be cool. Would just need it a few time per year.
I'd like to believe a "rentier" future will empower renters with even cheaper options due to efficiency of utility. As you say, having a big chunk of capability sit there most of the time is wasteful in a sense.
However it also feels like it entrenches the rich with further options of rent-seeking.
And it doesn't take much cynicism to think that any benefits due to efficient use of resources will go to the owners pocket, not the customer/renter.
It's so bad that it was cheaper for me to buy a wide format printer than it was to pay a print shop for prints to submit to the planning department.
To me it'd be worth a premium to not have to buy, store and dispose of something I know I'd rarely use, to the point that for some things I might well be fine with paying full purchase price if I can just avoid the hassle.
Renting in those instances would be more about avoiding annoyances than saving money.
At the same time I'd assume the amount of time specialized tools lay idle but lock up capital and storage space for providers of rented capacity means you need to recoup a lot of cost per rental event.
For an example of the actual sharing economy: I'm a member of a local cooperative that owns and maintains a fleet of ~3k cars, distributed across the country at most train stations and in many neighborhoods. For an initial deposit of $1k, "my car" is whatever I need it to be at that moment. If I need to transport furniture in the morning, it's a Mercedes Vito. For a leisurely drive in the countryside at lunch, it's an Audi convertible. And for a quick grocery run before stores close, a cheap Citroën C1 will do the trick. And because the whole thing is a cooperative, per-km prices are around what I'd pay if I owned any of the cars myself.
Sharing is great. Regulatory arbitrage masquerading as the sharing economy, less so.
I want to leave items in my car for tomorrow: my face mask, (previously) CDs and tapes, etc.
I want to spend the extra money for 'grippy' tires on my car, or do other mods like use sticky notes on the dash. I want my seat to be in the same position I left it in: It can take a day or two to get it just right. I want to have the option to use a seat cover for comfort.
I want to eat my lunch in my car: I control the climate, I control the music, and I can vape or smoke to my hearts content. It's mine to do that with.
I want to put off unloading my vehicle after a long and arduous camping trip, It's already 8PM when I get home. It can wait for tomorrow, and doesn't cost me anything.
I want to let my muddy dog jump into the back seats, I don't care if they get 'ruined', that's my choice about my property. I don't want a cleaning fee.
Lastly, I want to know for sure my dog won't eat the used condom the last person left under the seat. People are animals, no amount of cleaning between uses can ensure cleanliness 100% of the time. But I can in my car.
The point I want to make: SaaS, RegArb and the sharing economy are different things. If VW tries to charge you per-hour to use the software installed on your car, then let's talk about abusive software licensing. If Uber skirts regulations to muscle into the transportation market, let's frame the discussion around employment law and transport regulations. RegArb startups make it a habit of framing their business model as something else; and we're all better off if we don't fall for that trap :)
But if you have to own the car, fuck that. If you own it you should own access to all features that the hardware is capable of.
To me, an upfront $10,000 surcharge seems less scammy than what VW is offering, despite it likely being cheaper over the lifetime of the vehicle.
TBH it is hard to believe that it is required to have 8 $/h to have autonomous vehicle. Once we have the technology Google will build efficient data center with custom chips and the price will go down to X $/month. On top of it - I think the model will have to run locally, so it would make sense to pay upfront for extra hardware they put in your car and not that much for maintenance.
We are just not there yet, we don't have autonomous driving - we have better driver assistants.
I'm not such an alcoholic that I would pay $8.50/hr to drink beer on my way to work. And, realistically, we're decades away from being able to drink while AI drives.
I don't share it, as custom ECM tunes that increase performance (with the same "hardware") have been around for a very long time.
Also things like OnStar, and SirisXM
Along a similar vein--Nvidia artificially limiting hashrates on some of it's consumer GPU's.
I am far more upset with: A) Subscription fees for software in general. B) Tesla's autopilot code reseting when the Tesla is sold. Both directions, the new purchaser has to buy it again, the old owner has to buy it again on a new Tesla. C) Tesla conning people into paying 10,000 for cruise control plus, because people think it is Level 5 even though it falls far short of that. And any version hitting close to Level 5 is almost certainly going to require sensors that your car didn't have, so buy it again on a new car.
Even though VW's solution may be cheaper for many, the way it's being portrayed feels more scammy.
Given that autonomous vehicles do not suck time out of the user's budget, they might even be used more. At 3h/day, we already at $30B yearly revenue - almost half of what they made in 2020.
And software has marginal costs, so once you got over the investment (they recruit developers extremely heavily in Germany right now), you are looking at a more than comfortable income stream.
Not sure about you, but I literally see the level of dopamine floating on the VW management floors right now.
That said, I hope I never need a personal car in my life.
Just because the car is used, does not mean everybody unlocks the self driving mode.
I would not be surprised if you could unlock it unlimited fir a one time price.
It's a lot more than that:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272050/worldwide-vehicle...
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/group/portrait-and-productio...
Companies don't pay once for software, they hire a software team to maintain the code.
How would the royalties work? Do they all go to the person who first wrote the code? Based on the git blame of every line, so devs are always looking to rewrite as much as possible?
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't buy heavy vehicles that will start tearing it up. Much better to let the government own it, I think.
What benefit do you get from car ownership? Do you modify your car? Do you enjoy doing your own maintenance? For many people, the answer to both is a resounding no. For almost everyone, doing maintenance and repairs is totally impractical even if they were inclined to do so. Do you really own something if you are forced to take to the dealers regularly for maintenance and when things go wrong?
So what does the ownership get you? The sole responsibility if something goes wrong. The sole responsibility of keeping it maintained and roadworthy or disposing of it if you decide to write it off. And remember you can't really just write it off because you need it to get to work every day, plus it's a huge asset that you can't afford to replace outright.
For a very large number of people, "car ownership" really means the car owns them.
Ownership is great for many things, but each thing needs to be considered on its own merits. For most people, car ownership really doesn't make much sense.
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.
Well... that's not really how things work, is it? Already there are things that you will never be able to own and a lot of it depends on the circumstances of your birth.
Since you mention houses it touches upon another point which you may have been suggesting. Should ownership of certain basic things be a right? What should be included in that? A basic house of some standard? A car? It doesn't seem obvious what should and shouldn't be included.
Well, 60 years ago those were attainable relatively quickly for someone without a high school degree. Now they aren't (unless you want to live in the middle of nowhere) for someone even with a college degree. So something went awry in the meantime.
You may be an outlier. Usually people buy monthly passes for 150-200 dollars. It gets expensive when you have to commute from another town though, like taking the GO Train in Toronto.
https://www.ttc.ca/Fares_and_passes/PRESTO/Monthly_Pass_FAQ....
https://www.gotransit.com/en/trip-planning/presto/fare-disco...
https://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/ga/... (see monthly prices).
What is the difference between 1st class and 2nd class?
I am proud when I maximize the value the customer gets for the cost it takes to give them that value.
I'm skeptical about business plans that involve making value and then locking it away or (similarly) degrading value so you can some or all of it back to customers.
A good example is the airline industry that claims it needs the First class section to subsidize coach. Historically, they also put in complex rules that make you pay two or three times as much for coach ticket if you don't overstay the weekend.
The counterexample is that the most successful and consistently profitable airlines, like Southwest, don't play those games. On Delta or American you might wait 20 minutes for them to explain the 9 levels of boarding priority and which credit card entitles you to which priority and which status level on which partner airlines, etc.
On Southwest they would have the flight mostly boarded by the time the legacy airline had explained the boarding procedure. They wouldn't have to pay all the attendants to sit around, pay for the expensive jet stairs to be occupied, pay for the pilots to sit around, etc. They might even get another flight in.
"Price discrimination" frequently is "cutting off your nose to spite your face".
Whereas most of the flights I do, I absolutely care about boarding priority, seat assignments, and the occasional upgrade.
Once upon a time, I actually flew Southwest a lot on short-haul flights to Houston. These days, at least pre-pandemic, I care a lot about status on a given carrier.
Often the people handling the luggage think I'm strange to pay $50 to check a bag when I haven't maximized my carry-on bags or even take advantage of the free bag I get because I have the credit card. It might even get me investigated by the TSA for being un-American.
Surely it must be paid for though, right? The cost of autonomous driving isn’t the hardware - simply purchasing some cameras, a radar, and a ML GPU doesn’t mean the car can drive itself- it’s the software acting on inputs in a precise way to turn the wheel or brake in certain situations. You might be paying for the hardware in the initial purchase but your car would likely be thousands more expensive if they pro-rated the cost to build self driving into the MSRP.
There’s also no way I’d pay per hour for this kind of add on to a product I own.
If you talk to travel nerds and insiders you'll quickly find out pricing, inventory and revenue management in the [traditional] airline industry is labyrinthine on a good day.
It's also not true that the biggest comfiest seats necessarily subside the rest, it's far more likely that those booking last minute _in any class_ and those requiring ticket flexibility do subsidize everyone else.
"It is not surprising that both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have said that, per square foot, premium economy is the most profitable part of the plane"[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/apr/13/premium-econo...
They don't. Flight attendants only get paid when the doors are closed.
Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/westjet-minimum-wage-cupe-c...
US: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/flight-attendant-tiktok-dishing-jo...
The price may or may not be correct, but it doesn't appear to be fabricated out of pure intuition. It seems good to see an alternative pricing option on the table to Tesla's current single, up-front purchase price. As more players enter the market, some amount of economics should finally start to take hold such that the right price and model emerges. As they say, you have to start somewhere.
All of that said, at some level it feels like cars are headed to a place where autonomous driving is no longer an option, but an inseparable feature to the concept of owning a car. At that point, are you subscribing to the car or are you subscribing to the autonomous driving system?
1. A self-driving car will need lots of experience to get good. The way to get this experience is to get it to drive as many miles as possible, thus you want to make the marginal cost zero.
2. A self-driving car needs software maintenance and possibly remote control. It needs a recurring revenue stream to pay for the first and should pay-as-you-go for the second.
Technical factors apply.
At least in the US I think any kind of cellular-based V2X communication is a pipe dream. Carriers love the idea that you'd have another expensive subscription for your car, but they aren't interested in the investment to get sufficient network coverage. (E.g. how much more has Verizon spent touting the millimeter waver 'hotspots' that have in a few cities than on actually building them out?)
Carmakers could probably afford to front you $2000 worth of hardware (video-based self-driving system) but it's unimaginable that they could afford to put a LIDAR in (costs as much the engine) and expect to get paid for it in dribs and drabs.
For an Iphone you pay $800, get only 64GB SSD with about 50GB usable which will run out in a matter of months. Then you pay Apple $3 every month until eternity just to be able to use your phone, otherwise it will fill up and even non-apple services will fail to backup (eg, Whatsapp).
For future cars you will pay $30k for the car, which does not have radio, drive assist, etc. And you pay $2 every month to unlock the radio, $2 to unlock the Bluetooth, $2 to unlock the voice control, $2 for climate control, $10 for drive assists, and so on. Keep paying otherwise these basic features will become locked and the hardware you paid for will become less useful.
Why would it need constant updates? They should release and sell the feature when it is done.
This isn't my idea, came from listening some geohot interview but I think he is spot on.
Nothing prevents them from buying a non autonomous car and renting one when they need, say, when have drunk more than they should.
Let me elaborate: If you purchase an asset, that is seen as a store of value so you need to spread out the tax reductions over the useful life of the product. But like this, self-driving is taxed as a service, not as an asset. That means all expenses are immediately fully deductible. Also, that means you can buy an affordable used car, gain full tax benefits (because the previous owner waited through much of the useful tax life already) and then upgrade to self driving and get full tax benefits again.
For me personally, that means this feature would be effectively free because the tax savings cancel out the price.
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.
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.
If competition works the price and cost structure can‘t be much divorced and that would indicate a fixed price plus a regular service fee. To further adoption it makes sense to drop the former and carry the investment risk by the side that best can afford it.
My rare use probably means that I am not the ideal target market for something like this, but I am not opposed to the idea.
Minimum wage in Germany this year is 9.50€. Median wage in 2018 was about 16.50€.
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2020/10/PE20_416_623.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...
Start stop is poorly implemented, and can actively be dangerous in city driving. Many other aspects of the car that is software controlled is just crap. They can't even write code well enough for us to drive the car normally, now they want to drive the car for us, automatically?.
Hard pass.
Do you value the time you save by washing your clothes in a washing machine, compared to handwashing? Then maybe you'll be happy to pay £8 per hour for the time your washing machine is running? The washing machine can provide a touch tablet for surfing the web as you (don't) wash.
Are they expecting people to buy/lease cars and then pay a $8.50/hr service fee? With self-driving, ownership is a lot less desirable, compared to summoning one on demand.
That would mean those with a lot of thermal mass when they are sitting would have to pay more to get more electrons traveling through the tungsten heating elements. BMW would argue that this is a way to combat obesity.
And if you plan to work while driving, it will also be worth much more.
Personally I'd suggest that autonomous vans will really shake things up. Especially the combination of EV and autonomous.
It also - funny - is higher than the minimum wage in many places.
It might be cheaper to get a Human-in-the-loop than paying $8.50 per hour. You could have the driver remotely located driving you around over internet.
How can VW block Tesla from offering an hourly option?
That being said I think this would lead to more hardware, not just software, being locked behind subscriptions - as the article already mentions battery range/performance subscription. Simply because the companies are greedy. That's something that I would refuse to pay for via subscription.
If you just use the car for the daily commute, there should be better ways to commute (I know there often aren't, it's just a hypothetical).
Or untill I get banned from VW for self-driving offensively, or having sex in the car. Or untill all this data leaks or the car pushes ads on me.
Capitialism is eating personal liberty.
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 you just drive the car yourself?
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 sent me, then blocked me for requesting too many codes (2), leaving me stranded.
Then I went to rent 'official' London bikes, you have to accept 42 page rental agreement. And if the machine is out of paper, it will take your money but won't give you a code to get the bike. Their app will happily charge you for 2 bikes, and will give you 2 codes, but only one of them will work because you are only allowed 1 bike per person.
So I got sick of this BS and bought my own bike. It's less work than jumping through all the hoops these idiot companies make me deal with.
but this bullshit is invading every most private aspect of our lives and soon we will loose our rights to ownership.
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.
Having said that, I don't see myself migrating to a "modern" car any time soon. They are full of touch screens that are a notoriously awful user experience (an outstretched human arm in a moving vehicle is NOT a good nor comfortable pointer device).
My current car is a Volkswagen from 2016. The last of its kind with knobs all over the place and the touch screen being entirely optional. It's an ICE car but comes with lane assist, adaptive cruise control, is fully automatic, accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in about 6.5 seconds, has an amazing sound system, and takes me about 850 kilometers before needing to refuel.
In particular the ID.3 and such range of fully electric vehicles from Volkswagen are ridiculous. They are slow, have low range, are full of touch screens instead of tactile buttons, look like they are a design-by-boomer-committee result, and honestly they look like VW have been cutting corners everywhere to make the production costs as low as possible.
Autonomous driving is not going to be good for many years to come. I'll be very happy in my old-fashioned ICE car that I can refuel in 5 minutes flat, while the hip people are sitting in their E-cars recharging for 30 minutes to get home. If they can find a spot, that is.
What would a smart road be? Either some infrastructure that is designed for this or a digital overlay attached to it that every car nearby continuously updates in real time. Or maybe both.
That would mean an open standard and shared access to such an overlay, plus technology for that would have to be mandatory for new cars regardless of whether they plan to be autonomous or not. Right now it's just a capitalist rat race that no one is winning.
Attempts at renting your own hardware back to you should be rejected on sight.
The hardware will be, buy the software will probably need constant improvements and updates. It's more like having purchased an iPhone and having to pay a subscription to have access to real time map data.
But for advanced cruise control? Pass.
The difference between a level 2-3 and a level 5 car is the presence of a steering wheel and the legal requirement to have your hands on it. As incidents with Tesla show that need is both real but actually not that urgent given the fact that people get away with and are really creative in finding ways to not have their hands on the wheel. The occasional incidents because of that mean this is a problem but the lack of lots of incidents indicate that actually it's not completely horrible at what it does. Tesla is taking an incremental approach here and every incident makes the whole system a little safer. Their predictions as to when they will do level 5 and eventually 6 are of course wildly optimistic but the general approach is not without merit. They get lots of data and the improvements are basically data driven.
The middle ground here is level 4 where it becomes safe and legal to remove your hands from the wheel under some circumstances (like a road with special lanes, a well mapped and understood area, cars staying below certain speed limits, etc). Level 4 is basically what Waymo does in a very limited set of regions. Unlike Tesla, they actually have driver less cars though. Level 5 would be when they can do it anywhere. From 3 to 6 is basically a path of aggressively cutting down on the possibility for any kind of incident.
Make something so expensive or restricted that it compels people to pay much more for it "on-demand." My mom's modest new car came with adaptive cruise control that includes lane following, land changing, automatic speed matching (0 to 90 mph).. all included.
It's part of an after-sales monetization strategy like planned-obsolescence and planned-breakage by switching to cheaper, unrepairable materials like plastic and selling parts only as large, expensive assemblies.
One future extension of this is to load a car with so many features that the price then goes up far beyond what any mortal can afford, and then rent rides to replace individual vehicle ownership and taxis/Uber/ Lyft. In this event, such vehicles would be engineered for minimizing TCO for the corporation.
WeRide has many videos of their self-driving cars. The production ones have no driver and are used on major roads. The experimental ones have a safety driver and struggle through urban villages with people, bikes, and cars all over the street.
These cars are packed full of additional sensors, are monitored remotely and only drive on fixed, selected routes. It's state-run propaganda.
Rent seeking is a loophole to modern slavery. It's particularly sickening that a German company with questionable history takes a shot at that. But that's just my opinion.
We shouldn't even listen to them. Autonomous driving will happen in U.S. companies, and they will dictate what it will look like for the consumer.
I spend $1500/year on insurance and about $1000 in gas on a car I barely ever drive.
I am slow to get ready and leave the house as well.
If this thing could just show up at my doorstep and drive me to the grocery store and back every couple of weeks for a few dollars that would be incredible!
Plus I don't have to make smalltalk with a driver, bonus!
Not to mention the space I would save in my garage.
I wouldn't call $20 a week in gas "barely driving".
“ The average US resident drives 13,476 miles per year and spends about $1,262 on gasoline.”
But that’s immaterial.
If that’s 10,000 miles a year at an average of 20mph that’s 500 hours driving and 8,200 not driving - over 90% of the time the car is idle. I.e “hardly being used”
Would you pay for or use Uber if you also needed car insurance to be a passenger?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-09/vw-charge...
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15339250/everything-you-n...
Based on that history I'm not convinced that $8.50 per hour is even remotely reasonable and they already know it. Autonomous driving is a lot cheaper.
This doesn't mean that people won't pay it. Plenty will. But its more expensive than it should be.