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Comment by shazzy | Hacker News Reader

And for £18/month. Subscriptions for car features need to die.

Owning one of these cars I can tell you it's not worth the money. Drops out of hands free mode every few minutes.

The only way I'm paying a goddamn subscription for something like this is when it gets me from A to B without me needing to pay any attention beyond setting the destination and watching a movie.

If it doesn't work, under the Consumer Rights Act you need to ask for your money back, paying for stuff that doesn't work encourages companies to half-arse things.

I live in the US but disagree entirely. Works solid where I’m driving, rarely dropping out. I bet I get an average of 55min hands free per hour of interstate driving and it is very smooth. Would definitely pay monthly for the convenience, but so far it’s still free from purchase for me.

Everyone would rather pay $0/month rather than $18/month, but those aren't the choices actually being offered. Realistically it's either $x/month or $y upfront. Seeing tesla's track record of selling "full self driving" as an upfront charge, I prefer the subscription model more because it allows me to stop paying if the feature ends up being a dud.

Subscriptions for self-driving actually make sense, since the company is probably taking on liability if the car crashes or something else goes wrong.

Just makes sense for self driving to have a "combined" subscription that is or functions as insurance.

It is called insurance and is a heavily regulated thing.

Actually I think they're onto something, the company being required to get insurance [too] means they have more financial skin in the game. A crash when the car is being driven by the company's algorithm should be paid for by the company and not the driver. Same as if any other engineering defect causes an accident.

> Actually I think they're onto something, the company being required to get insurance [too] means they have more financial skin in the game.

No, a company that is liable has skin in the game, insurance mitigates rather than enhances that—its the whole point of insurance, swapping out risk for a fixed cost.

OTOH, the insurer then has skin in the game.

In bulk, there's no real difference between the company getting insurance for the user, versus the company being insurance for the user.

Either way, the cost they pay will be directly related to how safe it is. They have almost all the skin in the game.

Insurance as it currently exists makes no sense if the human 'operator' is not actually driving the car.

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