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You are conflating cost and price? Self-driving cars will be expensive because they will be marketed as a premium product to maximize profit. Sometimes public

You are conflating cost and price? Self-driving cars will be expensive because they will be marketed as a premium product to maximize profit. Sometimes public service must trump? Disclaimer: I live in Sweden, so my perspective may offend you ;)

JupiterMoon 11y ago
Cost and price are the same thing. Maybe you mean cost/price and worth/value?
- cjhveal 11y ago
  Price is the amount the consumer pays, while cost is the price the business pays. It may cost me $5 to produce a product, which I could then sell at a price of $7, for a profit of $2.
- willvarfar 11y ago
  Isn't the definition of "profit" literally the difference between cost and price? http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101314/what-difference-between-cost-and-price.asp http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101314/what-differen... My point is the BoM of self-driving sensors and cpus for a car is not actually that great. The new Teslas and Volvos don't have fancy lidar scanners like the Google cars have. The other day I was passenger in a automatic-breaking-at-intersections Volvo. We did not put that to the test. But its 'just' higher-precision parking sensors that are cheap and ubiquitous now.
simoncion 11y ago
I expect that self-driving cars will -at least initially- be expensive -in large part- because the sensing and computational hardware on the car is expensive.
- dvdcxn 11y ago
  Once Mass production kicks in the cars will get cheaper and cheaper as the processes to create them does so. When the automobile was first invented it would have seemed implausible for it to be accessible and (relatively) affordable to everyone. Look at where we are now.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > Once Mass production kicks in the cars will get cheaper and cheaper as the processes to create them does so. Yes, but there is an expected near-to-medium-term price floor on the sorts of good sensing equipment that such cars will require, not to mention certified (and patent-encumbered) software to fuse that data and turn it into useful and safe action. This is stuff that you don't want to cheap out on; it's how the car sees and operates safely!
  - demallien 11y ago
    Cars are still bloody expensive. Many many people make the decision not to buy a car when they live in a city with good public transport. It's only in places like Australia and most of the US where you practically need a car that ownership is ubiquitous. Elsewhere people find that there are better things to spend all of that money on...
parasubvert 11y ago
It's hard to forcibly lower the price of something without undermining your economic system. Software is expensive to make. Premium priced products exist because developers cost a lot of money and take a long time to get it right. Practically speaking you could government subsidize the software which is a respectable policy in Europe, and that would foster competition and drive the prices down.
wpietri 11y ago
> Self-driving cars will be expensive because they will be marketed as a premium product to maximize profit. You have this backward. The reason entrepreneurs often start with premium products is because you can extract more money from rich people and use that to pay product development costs. Developing self-driving cars is extremely expensive, and it will be for quite a while. The costs will eventually fall, but as with personal computers, it will take a while to figure out how to do that. If you really had cars that could self-drive and the technology was effectively free, then the profit-maximization strategy wouldn't be to sell Teslas, it would be to sell them to everybody. Tesla is selling maybe 10k cars per year. Even a $20k premium for self driving is only $200m. But the total US car market is 7 million or so. If you could get just an extra $1000, that would be $7,000m dollars in profit.

JupiterMoon 11y ago

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

cjhveal 11y ago
Price is the amount the consumer pays, while cost is the price the business pays. It may cost me $5 to produce a product, which I could then sell at a price of $7, for a profit of $2.
willvarfar 11y ago
Isn't the definition of "profit" literally the difference between cost and price? http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101314/what-difference-between-cost-and-price.asp http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101314/what-differen... My point is the BoM of self-driving sensors and cpus for a car is not actually that great. The new Teslas and Volvos don't have fancy lidar scanners like the Google cars have. The other day I was passenger in a automatic-breaking-at-intersections Volvo. We did not put that to the test. But its 'just' higher-precision parking sensors that are cheap and ubiquitous now.

simoncion 11y ago

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

dvdcxn 11y ago
Once Mass production kicks in the cars will get cheaper and cheaper as the processes to create them does so. When the automobile was first invented it would have seemed implausible for it to be accessible and (relatively) affordable to everyone. Look at where we are now.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > Once Mass production kicks in the cars will get cheaper and cheaper as the processes to create them does so. Yes, but there is an expected near-to-medium-term price floor on the sorts of good sensing equipment that such cars will require, not to mention certified (and patent-encumbered) software to fuse that data and turn it into useful and safe action. This is stuff that you don't want to cheap out on; it's how the car sees and operates safely!
- demallien 11y ago
  Cars are still bloody expensive. Many many people make the decision not to buy a car when they live in a city with good public transport. It's only in places like Australia and most of the US where you practically need a car that ownership is ubiquitous. Elsewhere people find that there are better things to spend all of that money on...

parasubvert 11y ago

It's hard to forcibly lower the price of something without undermining your economic system. Software is expensive to make. Premium priced products exist because developers cost a lot of money and take a long time to get it right. Practically speaking you could government subsidize the software which is a respectable policy in Europe, and that would foster competition and drive the prices down.

wpietri 11y ago

> Self-driving cars will be expensive because they will be marketed as a premium product to maximize profit. You have this backward. The reason entrepreneurs often start with premium products is because you can extract more money from rich people and use that to pay product development costs. Developing self-driving cars is extremely expensive, and it will be for quite a while. The costs will eventually fall, but as with personal computers, it will take a while to figure out how to do that. If you really had cars that could self-drive and the technology was effectively free, then the profit-maximization strategy wouldn't be to sell Teslas, it would be to sell them to everybody. Tesla is selling maybe 10k cars per year. Even a $20k premium for self driving is only $200m. But the total US car market is 7 million or so. If you could get just an extra $1000, that would be $7,000m dollars in profit.