The missing part, not that we have a way to estimate, is cost of labor to drive the car. People don't usually factor it in but self-driving offers the ability to sleep, listen to music, work, have conversation or whatever during the driving time. People seem to value their time at wildly different rates but it's not $0/hour.
I am always shocked that a craft store has 100+ kinds of acrylic yarn and maybe one or two wool yarns if that.
It seems a grandmother will spend 20 hours knitting a scarf and not care that they can make a much better product for a few $ more in materials.
In other case synthetic materials be might really better, but for knitted scarfs, sweaters, and such it no contest. One material will protect you from fire by forming a char (wool) and the other will melt and transport heat right to your skin and make sure you get burned.
Listen to music, yes, for most of the vehicles I've owned, though the most recent purchase has no radio (it predates radios in cars being a thing).
Have a conversation, I mean... yes? This is where my wife and I get a lot of discussions in, rolling down the road. If I want to talk to someone remotely, I can just pair my phone and have a conversation that way.
Work? Not directly, but I'm certainly free to have a complex problem rolling around in my head, pondering it from various angles, as I navigate down the road. At least for the stuff I do, this is the hard part, not the actual typing of code.
Sleep? No, but I work with technology for a living. There's no way in hell I would trust self driving nearly enough to close my eyes, much less actually sleep. Maybe in a few decades, but... if I drove in some areas like the current self driving tech, I'd be pulled over for driving while plastered.
I've no problem with driver assist technologies, but with where self driving is, we may as well be discussing antimater powered starships. "What would you pay for a ride on the Enterprise?"
Apparently you don't live in a country with a good long-distance public transport or long distance highspeed train network. Before covid, I regularly spent a few hours a week in a 300km/h ICE train in Germany. Nowadays, I spend similar time in my car (hint: it doesn't make 300km/h but traveling times are similar).
The major difference is of course not listening to music or having a phone call. The major difference is work and sleep. I can do both in the train, I cannot do it in a car at the driving seat :)
I would sleep on a train, if any came within a few hundred miles of me, but I've seen nothing so far that would make me trust a self driving car enough to sleep in it.
To each their own, but personally I much prefer to be driven somewhere in e.g. Lyft than to have to drive myself. I would bet that's worth at least a few dollars per hour to most people and thus would be relevant in the calculations I was originally responding to.
You say there is no way in hell you would trust self driving enough to close your eyes. My experience is most people come to trust it far too soon, not too late. It's not a problem. People trust something when they see it work a couple of times. Of course the car won't be sold unless it's been shown to do a better job than you do. You still might not trust it -- but most people will, even long before then.
The way I understand TFA, the $8.50/hr is what VW would charge you to use (unlock) their self-driving per hour. The article contrasts the quoted $8.50/hr with Tesla's $10,000 up front purchase required to unlock their self-driving.
"We must extract as much value from every minute of a person's life, in recurring fees!" is the sort of thinking that means I won't "engage with a product." Even if I end up using an objectively worse solution that isn't trying to put a timer on everything in my life and bill for it.
This, and every other modern way of trying to charge for features like this, continues down the path of "Sure, you might hold the title to the equipment, but it's still the manufacturers, and you will use it at their pleasure or not at all." It's more and more true in cars, it's exceedingly true in new farm equipment, and it's nonsense, in all forms.
Sell me a feature I can use as I choose, or don't bother. I don't want an always-on cellular OTA VPN link to the mothership to validate my credit card before engaging cloud-learning-based 5G self driving. I'd like a car I can use to get around, on my terms, with the tracking I choose (I choose none).
Practically speaking, though, since self driving doesn't exist outside some very limited cases, probably won't exist in a generally useful form for a decade or longer, and probably won't handle things I do on a regular basis (passing a tractor on a rural two lane), it's like asking me what I'd be willing to pay for fusion power. Make it work first, then ask.
Again with buying a product and having to pay extra to rent/lease capabilities already baked in? Is there some parallel here to the right to repair arguments with John Deere?
Pretty soon it will be considered anti-social or outdated to want to own your own independent vehicle that isn’t managed by centralized software systems or rented monthly. This is already largely the case with music and other digital products.
It really worries me that the next generation of automobiles seems anti-decentralization by design.
>Pretty soon it will be considered anti-social or outdated to want to own your own independent vehicle that isn’t managed by centralized software systems or rented monthly.
Given the trajectory of society this only makes having an independent vehicle more attractive.
Corporations are going to capture all the value of automation, aren’t they? No need to worry about right-to-repair laws when you can make last year’s firmware illegal for “safety” reasons. Someone hit your jailbroken car? Oops, no insurance for you.
Fantastic price if it is the full cost of running the car. Pretty bad deal if it is the marginal cost on top of having to own and operate the car and have to pay for the hardware to run the AP when you buy the car.
I get why subscriptions are a thing for access to a continuously maintained and improved software product. I just hate that they are trying to pin it on incremental use instead of access.
To me this feels too much like if Netflix tried to charge per hour consumed. I don't rent movies anymore because I like having access to a library. I feel the same way about my car. I bought a proper 4x4 because I need the ability to access high clearance low traction areas, and I paid for that upfront in the cost of the vehicle. I don't want to pay an extra $8/hr to use those features after already paying for them.
I’m actually from the UK myself. So I picked random Googled US min wage and assumed the poor driver would have to beg for tips and go bankrupt if he was sick.
Well, yet another needless subscription service. There will come a point where we own nothing and rent everything. If your income stops, so does everything else. Some of us im sure could manage the cashflow, and benefit from it, but for most it'll be subsistence in disguise.
Is it needless? Right now car ownership has a lot of extra costs for your normal, middle-class American
* Car payment
* Insurance payment
* Maintenance costs
* Parking costs
* Possible tolls
* Repairs
* Possibly roadside assistance
* Property tax (in some jurisdictions)
These are all costs of ownership. For people who own very cheap cars, or who can afford to pay cash for cars, it may be costly, but for many others, it may, in fact, streamline quite a few costs that they're already absorbing and managing.
I fear the world is already going this way. As a person approaching 30, most of my peers who did not stumble into lucrative tech careers are not doing well. Student debts still not paid off, working crappy paid jobs full time to rent cheap apartments, savings barely appearing let alone down payments for nice housing.
It doesn't surprise me to see the corporations lean into "services" and subscriptions; they are a great resource extractor
This is literally the "dream" of many - see the World Economic Forum's predictions about the future. It's a great dream for those doing the renting of stuff, and a nightmare for everyone else.
Too high. You can take a train from the edge of Manhattan to Harlem, about an hour trip for what, $2? How long would that same trip take during the day via car? 45 minutes maybe?
That's metro to metro where economies of scale dictate mass transit, but what about rural to rural, or rural to metro where there are no mass transit? What about last-mile? Last-mile is the most expensive step for parcel carriers even.
That doesn't even seem apples and oranges, though.
Today, if I want point-to-point, custom flexible timing and start/destination locations, with reasonable privacy and comfort, it'll cost me a lot more than either $2 or $8.5.
For example, a taxi from my home to airport is ~45min and typically costs me $75-$90CAD.
In Ottawa, a taxi trip from hotel to work is ~5-8min and is $11CAD.
So $8.5 for an hour is literally an order of magnitude less than what I'm currently paying.
But after going through the article I still don't 100% get what's the actual model - $8.50 total ad-hoc cost (essentially renting a service)? Or, as it appears, some implicit baseline hardware cost / traditional purcahse (buy a $xx,xxx.99 vehicle), in which case a subscription-based additional hourly cost would only serve to peeve me off?
Too high for me too. I’d consider the marginal utility of their self driving more at a price like that. The motor industry is in a interesting place with more of them considering subscriptions for feature unlocks. I think it’s a good thing if it means they can invest more to create better software. I don’t agree with it however and if i buy a car i want to know i own the car and won’t need a subscription to operate features. For example My Mercedes Me subscription lapsed a year or two ago i can’t be bothered to renew it… the features are just not that useful. Considering that many of the Mercedes Me features are free on a Tesla.
This is taking advantage of the fact that the metro charges a flat fee for trips of any length, when the average trip is much shorter. It also assumes that you are going between two places that happen to be right next to metro stations.
I'd be a bit irked by the subscription style / pay extra for the thing I already bought ... the idea they could just turn it off if I don't pay? model here.
Subscription style might be the only stomach-able model if the car company is going to be liable for "driving your car for you", almost like additional insurance only for when the fleet is operating in self-driving mode, and standard warranty terms when the car is operated by the user or idle.
If they do this, self driving will shoot itself in the foot. No one's paying for a robot to do this for _slightly less than minimum wage in most states_.
Perfect - this is exactly what I want vs paying $15K.
Running errands, no need to it. But I drive to clients and other longer trips, this is game changing if I could go full hands off and work during that time.
Uber runs about $100/hr I think - so if I could use my own car and not have to take uber (I often take uber precisely so I can work) then it's perfect. If price is 1/10th of the the marginal cost even better.
Was hoping the actual linked interview would clarify this, but it too didn’t seem crisp: would it be the cost of buying the car new + $8.50 per hour? Or is the idea that I never have to buy the thing outright, but I could get access to a self-driving car for $8.50 per hour?
The former seems absurd for many of the reasons found in the comments here. The latter would be appealing to me.
I don't think I would want that if I have to pay for the car on top of that, although I can see it being useful for long road trips - a drive to Chicago is about 5 and a half hours for me and $40-50 is about what I would pay in gas to get there, but I don't think I would feel too good about paying it, which would impact my brand relationship long term.
That would be great for our current needs. I work from home, and we drive maybe 10 000 km annually. Let's calculate with 50km/h because a lot of that is not on the highway. So 200 hours * $8.50 = $1600
I would love that! Now to the crucial part as a family:
- Is the car coming with the two seats for my kids?
- How to load/unload all the stuff we have? Stroller, Kickboard etc?
The best pre-covid estimate I could find for annual driving time is 18 days/adult/year. At 8.5$/hr, that works out to $3,672/year for the average adult.
Tesla charges $10k for their software upgrade to ~level 2 driving. So roughly 3 years to the break-even point, if the service is the same.
Self driving is a safety feature that will save lives. Charging a subscription fee or a fee per hour will cost lives and isn't worth whatever profits they might make.
These systems are expected to be constantly changing and improving, and making use of constant streams of new data on updates to roads, traffic, and more in order to run.
Yes, but the road to the mall changes from time to time, and the parking lot in the mall changes (watch a video of Waymo having to deal with a christmas tree lot set up in the parking lot of one of the malls they take a customer to.) No, they won't sell you the self-driving without the update service because they can't pass the liability on to you unless you're very rich.
before reading the article, i thought $8.50/hr for self-driving sounded like an amazing deal, assuming they meant a waymo-like service where that was the total cost.
but $8.50/hr to unlock a feature of a car you purchased and have to pay maintenance and fuel costs on seems like a pretty terrible deal.
In the US, Uber is an order of magnitude more expensive. For comparison I did a few Uber trips from Palo Alto, CA to downtown SF. It's about 45 miles (~70KM) I think and took tad under an hour. Uber charged me somewhere between $50-$60.
In India, on the other hand in a metro city you can cover between 20KM-30KM in an hour for which Uber charges around $7 (i.e., ~ INR 500).
I always pay significantly more than $8.50 for trips that are significantly less than an hour. I think $8.50/hour sounds incredibly cheap, like "wholesale" cheap considering the cost of fuel.
What if you want to go to an obscure trailhead? What taxi or driver would be willing to drive out 2 hours? Getting picked up, what driver-for-hire will come out 2 hours to pick you up?
It is challenging, but so far, have people refused to buy products/services they can't repair? Have all those products died in the market as a foregone conclusion?
- $8/hr in gas for compact gasoline cars (30 MPG, $4/gallon)
- $2.25/hr in electricity for electric cars (0.25 kWh/mile, $0.15/kWh)
- $12/hr in depreciation ($40k car lasting 200k miles)
- $32/hr is the IRS-approved reimbursement rate, supposed to cover fuel, maintenance, depreciation