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With a SASS product you're paying for ongoing access to a service with continuous improvements and a cost to the company to continue providing you. With heated

With a SASS product you're paying for ongoing access to a service with continuous improvements and a cost to the company to continue providing you. 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.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> you're paying for ongoing access to a service with continuous improvements and a cost to the company to continue providing you Why wouldn’t this apply to an autonomous driving service?
- Danieru 5y ago
  Because the hardware and sensors are all local, installed on the car from the factory. There is no economic advantage, just a business advantage
  - gambiting 5y ago
    To add to this - I'd be ok with VW charging for software updates after the first 3 years, like they do with maps. But the hardware and software that shipped from factory should work in perpetuity, period.
    - cwilkes 5y ago
      > But the hardware and software that shipped from factory should work in perpetuity, period. 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 They have to staff SWEs that can write security patches, have to maintain outdated methods to update the software, etc.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.
      - gambiting 5y ago
        But that's a legislative problem. I imagine at some point we'll get to a future where you can't enable autonomous self driving unless you have an approved patch 1.7X to your autonomous driving suite. Anything earlier than that is not allowed on public roads in autonomous mode. We're nowhere near that future though yet. 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.
  - jusssi 5y ago
    I think we're not anywhere near a level where a car could drive fully autonomously just with the local hardware, without a detailed data set of all the roads and real-time updates on conditions. That data set needs to be continuously maintained. 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.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      One argument in favor of subscriptions is that they align the interest of the consumer and the company. With an up-front payment model, the company has no particular interest, besides customer loyalty/reputation/etc., in providing continued updates/support for older models. (Which is sometimes enough--as with Apple in many cases, but often is not as with many IoT devices.) With a subscription model they do so long as subscription revenue exceeds costs.
      - Danieru 5y ago
        Cool, so they would refund the full price of the car if people are no longer happy with it? Or would the 20K+ car just serve as strong vendor lock to be exploited in subscriptions?
        ghaff 5y ago
        That assumes that the subscription is for the entire car. But that's pretty much what a lease is. And that's what a lot of people do. They pay a premium for a new car that they're only locked into for 3 years or so.
        iso1210 5y ago
        And its a great model for people who want a known payment of $x and don't want to take on the risk/reward of deprecation, maintenance, resale, etc. 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.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Is there any public record anywhere of any auto manufacturer anywhere that is implementing or proposing to implement autonomous driving as a service? Isn't that almost an oxymoron? 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.
toast0 5y ago
Tesla seems to be doing a lot of continuous development and the costs for that have to come from somewhere. 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?
t0mas88 5y ago
It's more nuanced to me then "the hardware is there". Because by that reasoning you should be able to take any empty airline seat for $ 5 since the flight is already going and will only use 0.00something extra fuel with you in the seat. And yet airline pricing is a big data science project at each of them. 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.
- datameta 5y ago
  The difference is that you own the vehicle and everything in it. Whereas in taking a flight you pay for roughly the combined value of limited seating, plus service by the flight and ground crews, plus fuel expended by the plane. Therein lies the rub.
iso1210 5y ago
> A world where my car gets micro-transactions to turn on the AC or heaters etc scares me. 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
cwilkes 5y ago
> With heated seats the hardware to provide the functionality was either fitted or no 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.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> you're paying for ongoing access to a service with continuous improvements and a cost to the company to continue providing you Why wouldn’t this apply to an autonomous driving service?

Danieru 5y ago
Because the hardware and sensors are all local, installed on the car from the factory. There is no economic advantage, just a business advantage
- gambiting 5y ago
  To add to this - I'd be ok with VW charging for software updates after the first 3 years, like they do with maps. But the hardware and software that shipped from factory should work in perpetuity, period.
  - cwilkes 5y ago
    > But the hardware and software that shipped from factory should work in perpetuity, period. 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.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      But that's a legislative problem. I imagine at some point we'll get to a future where you can't enable autonomous self driving unless you have an approved patch 1.7X to your autonomous driving suite. Anything earlier than that is not allowed on public roads in autonomous mode. We're nowhere near that future though yet. 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.
- jusssi 5y ago
  I think we're not anywhere near a level where a car could drive fully autonomously just with the local hardware, without a detailed data set of all the roads and real-time updates on conditions. That data set needs to be continuously maintained. 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.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    One argument in favor of subscriptions is that they align the interest of the consumer and the company. With an up-front payment model, the company has no particular interest, besides customer loyalty/reputation/etc., in providing continued updates/support for older models. (Which is sometimes enough--as with Apple in many cases, but often is not as with many IoT devices.) With a subscription model they do so long as subscription revenue exceeds costs.
    - Danieru 5y ago
      Cool, so they would refund the full price of the car if people are no longer happy with it? Or would the 20K+ car just serve as strong vendor lock to be exploited in subscriptions?
      - ghaff 5y ago
        That assumes that the subscription is for the entire car. But that's pretty much what a lease is. And that's what a lot of people do. They pay a premium for a new car that they're only locked into for 3 years or so.
        iso1210 5y ago
        And its a great model for people who want a known payment of $x and don't want to take on the risk/reward of deprecation, maintenance, resale, etc. 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.
Silhouette 5y ago
Is there any public record anywhere of any auto manufacturer anywhere that is implementing or proposing to implement autonomous driving as a service? Isn't that almost an oxymoron? 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.

toast0 5y ago

Tesla seems to be doing a lot of continuous development and the costs for that have to come from somewhere. 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?

t0mas88 5y ago

It's more nuanced to me then "the hardware is there". Because by that reasoning you should be able to take any empty airline seat for $ 5 since the flight is already going and will only use 0.00something extra fuel with you in the seat. And yet airline pricing is a big data science project at each of them. 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.

datameta 5y ago
The difference is that you own the vehicle and everything in it. Whereas in taking a flight you pay for roughly the combined value of limited seating, plus service by the flight and ground crews, plus fuel expended by the plane. Therein lies the rub.

iso1210 5y ago

> A world where my car gets micro-transactions to turn on the AC or heaters etc scares me. 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

cwilkes 5y ago

> With heated seats the hardware to provide the functionality was either fitted or no 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.