5 ms·

Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle?

Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car? If flying were more affordable and less strict more people would own their own plane. It isn't and they don't. I see self-driving cars a lot like airplanes and John Deere tractors. That is, expensive proprietary tech that you have no control over. No thank you. Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?

stdgy 10y ago
We've already seen price drops for the most expensive self-driving components. LIDARs, GPUs and storage have already fallen in cost, and the products aren't even on the market yet. There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  > There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production. Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. I don't want walmart brand, everday low price components on my self-driving vehicle. I want top of the line if my life is in the balance.
  - joshuamorton 10y ago
    >Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. Google claims that it dropped the price of lidar by a factor of 10x once it started producing them. That seems like a significant, factual, drop in cost.
    - monkmartinez 10y ago
      The iPhone is how much to produce? Very important point you missed in what I wrote; Hardware and software package. A lidar without software is useless.
      - joshuamorton 10y ago
        The price dropped from something ridiculous (~100K) to something manageable for a luxury car (~10K), and certainly reasonable as a cost offset by multiple consumers (like in a rideshare environment).
        monkmartinez 10y ago
        It doesn't matter. As we have learned with the John Deere tractor situation is that we will lose even more control. Think buying and maintaining a car is expensive now? Wait until you literally can't drive it without paying for a software update. I'm sorry, but I don't see anything cool in this other than a quick nap sometimes on a long road trip. Everything else quickly approaches pain in the ass levels to the point where I would rather have carburetors back. Also, don't want to rideshare with a group of disgusting people. I work in EMS and I see first hand what nastiness is out there. Nope.
        joshuamorton 10y ago
        So your argument went from "its economically infeasible" to "I don't like it!"?
        monkmartinez 10y ago
        No... in addition to being prohibitively expensive, the other model being put forth to make it less expensive, ride-sharing, also has drawbacks which make the idea a non-starter for most Americans. If ridesharing was awesome, we would see it now with luxury cars. We don't because it is stupid and will not reduce the price of the car dramatically enough to outweigh the negatives.
  - stdgy 10y ago
    How much does your 'top of the line' lane-staying sensor cost? How about your backup camera? How about automatic breaking sensors? How about all of the components required to integrate these sensors into your vehicle? These are all things that started high and fell low. The historical prices for each of these systems reflects this fact, as does their gradual movement through the available product line-up. They all started in top of the line vehicles that cost well north of the average person's yearly salary, and are steadily creeping into the lowliest models. I see nothing in self-driving systems that make them special in this regard. They're already largely an amalgamation of commodity components whose prices are trending downwards. You can bet on them staying a niche product forever, if you wish. I just think it flies in the face of historical evidence.
jliptzin 10y ago
I'll bet you would have said the same thing about a $5,000 personal computer in the early 90s.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  We still have $5000 personal computers in the '10s! Hell a new MacBook Pro with everything and some upgrades is $3499 to $4299... very few people can truly afford that.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    The late Bill Machrone coined Machrone's Law which stated that "the computer you want always costs $5,000." This hasn't really been true for 5-10 years. You can build a $5K computer but you have to really push it. But saying that the figure is still at least $2,500-$3,000 is probably fair.
    - tempestn 10y ago
      Sure, but you can also build a perfectly serviceable computer for < $1000. Even $500 would (obviously) get you something far, far superior to that 90s machine.
  - svachalek 10y ago
    That's not accounting for inflation - $5000 then was more like $10000 now. And a bare-bones minimum machine for running business software (i.e. no color graphics or floating point hardware) was still close to $2000 (more like $4000 in today's dollars). So, roughly speaking a maxed-out gaming rig today is about as affordable as a bare-minimum box in 1990, without even accounting for the massive difference in absolute power.
    - jliptzin 10y ago
      That's the point
- Noos 10y ago
Qwertious 10y ago
"Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?" Because you don't need to own the car - you could feasibly rent one on demand (like a taxi), since you can now rent a car without the necessary wage overhead of the taxi driver, or the minimum costs of car-rental (i.e. car rental typically is per-day, for logistical reasons) or the logistical problems of car-rental (i.e. you need to drive to and from the car-rental place, to pick up and drop off the car - and by "drive" I mean "get a lift or use public transport"). Plus, the self-driving stuff shouldn't be particularly expensive, and will be counterbalanced by lower insurance premiums, and likely tax incentives once voters realise that they really do save lives. "Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?" Because just about everything decreases with scale, and it's not inherently hard tech. Tesla's main problem is their lack of scale. As are autonomous cars. "Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?" Money. It's not "want", it's "can tolerate so as to save money". Your car, when adding together all the costs (purchase, fuel, rego, maintenance, interest payments if you borrow instead of buying outright) is one of the biggest expenses that most people have. Sharing a car between several people should decrease the costs by an order of magnitude, which could be used to buy whatever people spend their money on these days, or saved.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  I live in the suburbs. I have a family with two grade school kids that participate in seasonal team sports and year-round gymnastics. They attend a charter school with no school bus system. Let's say each ride cost $10... that is $20 to $40 per day just for the kids on most weekdays. Add in birthday parties, saturday games, doctor/dentist, trip to grandma/grandpa that live 7 miles away... and we are talking $1000 per month in "ride-sharing costs" for my children alone. We could add in my wife and I's costs, but it would be silly. Maybe this service is less than $10 per ride, even at $5 per ride it is wayyyyyy more expensive than I currently spend on a 4 year old Toyota Highlander with low miles with insurance and fuel.
  - 10y ago
alasdair_ 10y ago
> Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? I'd quite like the freedom to be able to commute to work, go out for drinks with people after work and come home again at the time of my choosing without relying upon someone else to cart me around, paid driver or otherwise. THAT seems freedom-enhancing.

stdgy 10y ago

We've already seen price drops for the most expensive self-driving components. LIDARs, GPUs and storage have already fallen in cost, and the products aren't even on the market yet. There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.

monkmartinez 10y ago
> There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production. Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. I don't want walmart brand, everday low price components on my self-driving vehicle. I want top of the line if my life is in the balance.
- joshuamorton 10y ago
  >Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. Google claims that it dropped the price of lidar by a factor of 10x once it started producing them. That seems like a significant, factual, drop in cost.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    The iPhone is how much to produce? Very important point you missed in what I wrote; Hardware and software package. A lidar without software is useless.
    - joshuamorton 10y ago
      The price dropped from something ridiculous (~100K) to something manageable for a luxury car (~10K), and certainly reasonable as a cost offset by multiple consumers (like in a rideshare environment).
      - monkmartinez 10y ago
        It doesn't matter. As we have learned with the John Deere tractor situation is that we will lose even more control. Think buying and maintaining a car is expensive now? Wait until you literally can't drive it without paying for a software update. I'm sorry, but I don't see anything cool in this other than a quick nap sometimes on a long road trip. Everything else quickly approaches pain in the ass levels to the point where I would rather have carburetors back. Also, don't want to rideshare with a group of disgusting people. I work in EMS and I see first hand what nastiness is out there. Nope.
        joshuamorton 10y ago
        So your argument went from "its economically infeasible" to "I don't like it!"?
        monkmartinez 10y ago
        No... in addition to being prohibitively expensive, the other model being put forth to make it less expensive, ride-sharing, also has drawbacks which make the idea a non-starter for most Americans. If ridesharing was awesome, we would see it now with luxury cars. We don't because it is stupid and will not reduce the price of the car dramatically enough to outweigh the negatives.
- stdgy 10y ago
  How much does your 'top of the line' lane-staying sensor cost? How about your backup camera? How about automatic breaking sensors? How about all of the components required to integrate these sensors into your vehicle? These are all things that started high and fell low. The historical prices for each of these systems reflects this fact, as does their gradual movement through the available product line-up. They all started in top of the line vehicles that cost well north of the average person's yearly salary, and are steadily creeping into the lowliest models. I see nothing in self-driving systems that make them special in this regard. They're already largely an amalgamation of commodity components whose prices are trending downwards. You can bet on them staying a niche product forever, if you wish. I just think it flies in the face of historical evidence.

jliptzin 10y ago

I'll bet you would have said the same thing about a $5,000 personal computer in the early 90s.

monkmartinez 10y ago
We still have $5000 personal computers in the '10s! Hell a new MacBook Pro with everything and some upgrades is $3499 to $4299... very few people can truly afford that.
- ghaff 10y ago
  The late Bill Machrone coined Machrone's Law which stated that "the computer you want always costs $5,000." This hasn't really been true for 5-10 years. You can build a $5K computer but you have to really push it. But saying that the figure is still at least $2,500-$3,000 is probably fair.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    Sure, but you can also build a perfectly serviceable computer for < $1000. Even $500 would (obviously) get you something far, far superior to that 90s machine.
- svachalek 10y ago
  That's not accounting for inflation - $5000 then was more like $10000 now. And a bare-bones minimum machine for running business software (i.e. no color graphics or floating point hardware) was still close to $2000 (more like $4000 in today's dollars). So, roughly speaking a maxed-out gaming rig today is about as affordable as a bare-minimum box in 1990, without even accounting for the massive difference in absolute power.
  - jliptzin 10y ago
    That's the point
Noos 10y ago

Qwertious 10y ago

"Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?" Because you don't need to own the car - you could feasibly rent one on demand (like a taxi), since you can now rent a car without the necessary wage overhead of the taxi driver, or the minimum costs of car-rental (i.e. car rental typically is per-day, for logistical reasons) or the logistical problems of car-rental (i.e. you need to drive to and from the car-rental place, to pick up and drop off the car - and by "drive" I mean "get a lift or use public transport"). Plus, the self-driving stuff shouldn't be particularly expensive, and will be counterbalanced by lower insurance premiums, and likely tax incentives once voters realise that they really do save lives. "Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?" Because just about everything decreases with scale, and it's not inherently hard tech. Tesla's main problem is their lack of scale. As are autonomous cars. "Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?" Money. It's not "want", it's "can tolerate so as to save money". Your car, when adding together all the costs (purchase, fuel, rego, maintenance, interest payments if you borrow instead of buying outright) is one of the biggest expenses that most people have. Sharing a car between several people should decrease the costs by an order of magnitude, which could be used to buy whatever people spend their money on these days, or saved.

monkmartinez 10y ago
I live in the suburbs. I have a family with two grade school kids that participate in seasonal team sports and year-round gymnastics. They attend a charter school with no school bus system. Let's say each ride cost $10... that is $20 to $40 per day just for the kids on most weekdays. Add in birthday parties, saturday games, doctor/dentist, trip to grandma/grandpa that live 7 miles away... and we are talking $1000 per month in "ride-sharing costs" for my children alone. We could add in my wife and I's costs, but it would be silly. Maybe this service is less than $10 per ride, even at $5 per ride it is wayyyyyy more expensive than I currently spend on a 4 year old Toyota Highlander with low miles with insurance and fuel.
- 10y ago

alasdair_ 10y ago

> Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? I'd quite like the freedom to be able to commute to work, go out for drinks with people after work and come home again at the time of my choosing without relying upon someone else to cart me around, paid driver or otherwise. THAT seems freedom-enhancing.