5 ms·

> At least, with VW system, you pay when you use it. Doesn't work in your area, you don't pay. "AWS has billed us tens of thousands of dollars because we forgo

> At least, with VW system, you pay when you use it. Doesn't work in your area, you don't pay. "AWS has billed us tens of thousands of dollars because we forgot to turn something off/confusing billing" hasn't taught anyone anything? There's nothing honest about VW's approach. They won't have self-driving either, it will be at best the same as Tesla's. And yet, they want to charge you, and charge you significantly more than 10k upfront (because they expect to extract this payment every time, all the time, for the entire lifetime of the car).

iso1210 5y ago
That's the same argument against software-as-a-service Maybe I'm not bothered about self driving for 90% of my journeys, but on occasion I'm going somewhere unusual or want to travel overnight or after drinking or whatever I'll just pay for a few hours. Imagine a world where there was just a set fee of $x per hour and $x per mile to travel. Would allow a far easier choice between different modes of transport, as the marginal cost becomes the actual cost. (Of course self driving is years away so this is all just spin)
- bluGill 5y ago
  It won't be long after self driving arrives and you won't get that option. Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases. Once self driving is better survival than humans it won't be legal to drive on public roads.
  - g00gler 5y ago
    A future where humans are no longer able to drive will have to be a decade or more after self driving arrives. It’s impossible for everyone to replace their non self driving cars immediately. The used car market is a $150bn industry. A quick spot check found that a 2010 Honda Civic still costs between $5k and $10k depending on mileage, etc. By the time that self driving is required by the NHSA or whatever body requires backup cameras and the like in new cars self driving will be standard. A $20k Subaru will come with it out of the box, no add ons, just like a backup camera today.
    - jewel 5y ago
      It might be possible to add self-driving features as an aftermarket upgrade. My 2013 model car already has drive-by-wire features (for automatic parallel parking), so it just needs more cameras and a replacement CPU. Heck, as a last resort you could put a robot in the driver's seat, physically operating the steering wheel and pedals.
    - twiddling 5y ago
      <A future where humans are no longer able to drive will have to be a decade or more after self driving arrives. The National Driver's Association will arise with bumper stickers: "You can pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead hands"
      - iso1210 5y ago
        ...38,000 times a year As self driving becomes common, people won't bother with getting a driving license. States that do can actually put in decent levels of restrictions and competency to get one rather than letting an 16 year old with 5 minutes driving round a car park out on the road. As fewer people get new licesnse, the demand for self-driving goes down as people who can drive the legacy way die off.
  - amcoastal 5y ago
    Maybe where you live. There's a 0% chance human driving will be banned in America until we are all well passed driving age.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      I wouldn’t be so confident. I think you’re drastically underrating how much convenience will drive changes in behavior and social expectation. If self driving works (big if, I’m dubious about this), then the vast majority of us will switch over to using it for regular trips very quickly. As that happens, the perception about what is safe and socially acceptable will change quickly, as will the types of vehicles consumers demand. This type of change isn’t instant, but it can happen faster than a human lifespan. Think about someone born in the 70s and what they’ve experienced with cigarettes. They were born into a world where close to half the US population smoked, and they’re now retiring in a world where smoking is de facto banned in most non-residential buildings. That is a drastic change, and remember that tobacco is addictive, which hampers change much more effectively than habits like driving.
      - kortex 5y ago
        I wouldn't be so confident 100% ("steering-wheel-less") L5 self-driving is possible. Long tail is a thing. There will for a long time be a need for manual override, for things like tricky parking or slow-speed maneuvering, bad weather, weird lightning conditions, etc. That rules out de facto driving ban. That leaves driving ban by fiat. Also never gonna happen in this century, unless it carves out an exception for "classic cars." As far as hazard ratios go, cigarette smoking is orders of magnitude more dangerous than driving. Not a good comparison.
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        > I wouldn't be so confident 100% ("steering-wheel-less") L5 self-driving is possible. I’m not, you didn’t read what I wrote. I specifically predicated my theory on if it was possible, and indicated my reservations there.
        5y ago
  - ryathal 5y ago
    Maybe on restricted access highways, but self driving isn't coming to dirt and gravel roads any time soon.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      From a technology standpoint, this seems much much easier for AVs vs humans than many other AV challenges. When it comes to measuring physics precisely, complex computation, and rapid control, computers beat humans by a million miles. This is in stark contrast to, say, driving through a crowded urban environment with all manner of rule-breaking peds and bikes popping out of everywhere.
      - kube-system 5y ago
        The ability to calculate the physics of driving dynamics has been solved for decades. But, if you feed garbage data to your physics models, you will get a garbage result. Computers are still very very awful at image processing as compared to humans.
        wutbrodo 5y ago
        Yes, I'm saying that environments with diet and gravel roads are a much easier perception problem than dense urban environments, and perception is one of autonomous driving's weak spots. Conversely, quick physics computation and response is a relative weakness of human drivers, and is exacerbated by these environments.
    - iso1210 5y ago
      So this model works well - rather than paying $10k for a feature that only works for 100 hours a year you spend on the freeway, and not the 400 hours you spend on your dirt road in smallville, you get the benefit when you go and visit Aunt Mabel without having to pay a large fee upfront.
  - ars 5y ago
    > Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases. Humans drive correctly 99.99999% of the time. We can't can't even keep a computer up and running that well, never mind driving perfectly. See this thread with the math: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 The future you are expecting is never going to happen.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      > Humans drive correctly 99.99999% of the time. We can't can't even keep a computer up and running that well, never mind driving perfectly. This comparison doesn't make any sense. You're comparing _continuous_ operation with the aggregate of the average human's bouts of driving. Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly. A sensible analogue would be something like aircraft software, which I'd guess does have near the reliability of human drivers (and can last much longer continuously than humans do).
      - ars 5y ago
        > You're comparing _continuous_ operation with the aggregate of the average human's bouts of driving. I don't understand what you mean. I'm comparing actual time behind the wheel - hours of correct driving vs hours (well minutes) of incorrect driving. Do the math yourself, take total hours behind the wheel and divide by the accident rate, like I did. You'll get the same results. Depending on your assumptions anywhere from 99.999 to 99.99999% correct driving by humans. > Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly. Again, I'm not comparing constantly, I'm comparing actual hours behind the wheel.
        iso1210 5y ago
        84 billion hours of driving[0] for 35,485 deaths[1]. That's one death per 2.4 million hours, so that's an indicator of the magnitude that's needed before even talking about it. That number also means no situations where the computer gives up and hands control back to the driver. If autonomous cars can never hand back (at most stopping legally, safely and out of traffic) and cause 1 death per 10 million hours, that would seem about right. [0] https://www.volpe.dot.gov/news/how-much-time-do-americans-spend-behind-wheel https://www.volpe.dot.gov/news/how-much-time-do-americans-sp... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
- dmitriid 5y ago
  And then you forget to click a "don't use autopilot" setting buried in three levels of settings, and will pay for a month-worth of driving.
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    Seems to me it would be difficult to not notice your car driving itself.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      It doesn't matter if the car drives itself or not. What matters is how money is withdrawn. It's enough to have "on/off" somewhere in settings, and have it "enabled" even if you don't use it. Good grief, there are countless articles even here on HN about dark patterns where people are tricked into subscribing to something, or being unable to unsusbcribe except when going through the hoops. But sure, a car manufacturer charging maney for a subscription will never ever do that as long as you "don't use a feature".
SamBam 5y ago
You're inventing hypotheticals to say why they're going to charge you more, without evidence. Pay-per-minute autonomous driving is far more like old pay-per-minute phone plans than it is mystery-AWS-data-charges. You know when it's driving and when it's not. There's no unforeseeable per-lambda charges about it.
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  I think it's reasonable to worry that WV or another company might start charging a variable rate for different "types" of autonomous driving. Pay-per-minute phone plans could be just as mysterious when you factored in long distance and peak usage hours. It's not a huge logical leap to think that a subscription based service like this could lead to things such as: You want to travel between point A and B several miles apart in rural Kansas on a straight road with a road density of 2 vehicles per mile? "Sure, that's 8.50 an hour." Oh, you want to travel between Newark and Manhattan in the middle of a snowstorm? "That will be 15 an hour because we have to cover the costs for the real-time feed of data from our weather and control center" Oh, you have a camper, too? "That's an additional 2 bucks an hour for our towing package" Oh, you're traveling across state lines and the state over imposes an additional tax on autonomous driving. "we need to charge you 8.75 to cover the tax and our costs but only in that state."
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > You're inventing hypotheticals to say why they're going to charge you more, without evidence. Ah yes. There's no evidence. Except the countless instances of dark patterns everywhere on the web tricking into you paying money. Countless instances where you can't cancel a subscription, and have to go through multiple hoops to do it. Countless instances when there's a runaway billing in a SaaS that leaves people with huge bills. But sure. These are all just "hypotheticals", and not the reality how the absolute vast majority of subscription business works. > You know when it's driving and when it's not. There's no unforeseeable per-lambda charges about it. Ah yes. Because of course it will be as simple as "when it's on, it will be charged", and not "when an obscure setting is on, you will be charged, regardless of whether it will be self-driving or not".
Larrikin 5y ago
There is very little reason to believe Tesla will be best let alone first when it comes to self driving technology. I personally feel they are backing the wrong technology and will ultimately be unsuccessful without LIDAR sensors like Waymo and other startups and the beta testers with current model Teslas are going to ultimately end up disappointed. I don't own a car currently (nor any Tesla stock) so I'm happy to wait and see if I'm wrong or right.
- vardump 5y ago
  Tesla can already generate a pretty good "lidar point cloud" out of just camera input. But we'll see.
  - jsight 5y ago
    One issue with Tesla's approach is that they do not have enough cameras to do this at every angle. Its going to be especially tough in parking lots, as they have very poor coverage of the road directly beneath them. Mobileye's camera based point cloud approach appears to be much more robust.
    - vardump 5y ago
      Why would the car need to see the road directly beneath while parking? Because of positional error (drift) or what? It should know the painted markings from earlier frames. Good point though. I'd like Tesla to add more cameras.

iso1210 5y ago

That's the same argument against software-as-a-service Maybe I'm not bothered about self driving for 90% of my journeys, but on occasion I'm going somewhere unusual or want to travel overnight or after drinking or whatever I'll just pay for a few hours. Imagine a world where there was just a set fee of $x per hour and $x per mile to travel. Would allow a far easier choice between different modes of transport, as the marginal cost becomes the actual cost. (Of course self driving is years away so this is all just spin)

bluGill 5y ago
It won't be long after self driving arrives and you won't get that option. Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases. Once self driving is better survival than humans it won't be legal to drive on public roads.
- g00gler 5y ago
  A future where humans are no longer able to drive will have to be a decade or more after self driving arrives. It’s impossible for everyone to replace their non self driving cars immediately. The used car market is a $150bn industry. A quick spot check found that a 2010 Honda Civic still costs between $5k and $10k depending on mileage, etc. By the time that self driving is required by the NHSA or whatever body requires backup cameras and the like in new cars self driving will be standard. A $20k Subaru will come with it out of the box, no add ons, just like a backup camera today.
  - jewel 5y ago
    It might be possible to add self-driving features as an aftermarket upgrade. My 2013 model car already has drive-by-wire features (for automatic parallel parking), so it just needs more cameras and a replacement CPU. Heck, as a last resort you could put a robot in the driver's seat, physically operating the steering wheel and pedals.
  - twiddling 5y ago
    <A future where humans are no longer able to drive will have to be a decade or more after self driving arrives. The National Driver's Association will arise with bumper stickers: "You can pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead hands"
    - iso1210 5y ago
      ...38,000 times a year As self driving becomes common, people won't bother with getting a driving license. States that do can actually put in decent levels of restrictions and competency to get one rather than letting an 16 year old with 5 minutes driving round a car park out on the road. As fewer people get new licesnse, the demand for self-driving goes down as people who can drive the legacy way die off.
- amcoastal 5y ago
  Maybe where you live. There's a 0% chance human driving will be banned in America until we are all well passed driving age.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I wouldn’t be so confident. I think you’re drastically underrating how much convenience will drive changes in behavior and social expectation. If self driving works (big if, I’m dubious about this), then the vast majority of us will switch over to using it for regular trips very quickly. As that happens, the perception about what is safe and socially acceptable will change quickly, as will the types of vehicles consumers demand. This type of change isn’t instant, but it can happen faster than a human lifespan. Think about someone born in the 70s and what they’ve experienced with cigarettes. They were born into a world where close to half the US population smoked, and they’re now retiring in a world where smoking is de facto banned in most non-residential buildings. That is a drastic change, and remember that tobacco is addictive, which hampers change much more effectively than habits like driving.
    - kortex 5y ago
      I wouldn't be so confident 100% ("steering-wheel-less") L5 self-driving is possible. Long tail is a thing. There will for a long time be a need for manual override, for things like tricky parking or slow-speed maneuvering, bad weather, weird lightning conditions, etc. That rules out de facto driving ban. That leaves driving ban by fiat. Also never gonna happen in this century, unless it carves out an exception for "classic cars." As far as hazard ratios go, cigarette smoking is orders of magnitude more dangerous than driving. Not a good comparison.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        > I wouldn't be so confident 100% ("steering-wheel-less") L5 self-driving is possible. I’m not, you didn’t read what I wrote. I specifically predicated my theory on if it was possible, and indicated my reservations there.
      - 5y ago
- ryathal 5y ago
  Maybe on restricted access highways, but self driving isn't coming to dirt and gravel roads any time soon.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    From a technology standpoint, this seems much much easier for AVs vs humans than many other AV challenges. When it comes to measuring physics precisely, complex computation, and rapid control, computers beat humans by a million miles. This is in stark contrast to, say, driving through a crowded urban environment with all manner of rule-breaking peds and bikes popping out of everywhere.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      The ability to calculate the physics of driving dynamics has been solved for decades. But, if you feed garbage data to your physics models, you will get a garbage result. Computers are still very very awful at image processing as compared to humans.
      - wutbrodo 5y ago
        Yes, I'm saying that environments with diet and gravel roads are a much easier perception problem than dense urban environments, and perception is one of autonomous driving's weak spots. Conversely, quick physics computation and response is a relative weakness of human drivers, and is exacerbated by these environments.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    So this model works well - rather than paying $10k for a feature that only works for 100 hours a year you spend on the freeway, and not the 400 hours you spend on your dirt road in smallville, you get the benefit when you go and visit Aunt Mabel without having to pay a large fee upfront.
- ars 5y ago
  > Humans are terrible drivers, even in the best cases. Humans drive correctly 99.99999% of the time. We can't can't even keep a computer up and running that well, never mind driving perfectly. See this thread with the math: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 The future you are expecting is never going to happen.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    > Humans drive correctly 99.99999% of the time. We can't can't even keep a computer up and running that well, never mind driving perfectly. This comparison doesn't make any sense. You're comparing _continuous_ operation with the aggregate of the average human's bouts of driving. Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly. A sensible analogue would be something like aircraft software, which I'd guess does have near the reliability of human drivers (and can last much longer continuously than humans do).
    - ars 5y ago
      > You're comparing _continuous_ operation with the aggregate of the average human's bouts of driving. I don't understand what you mean. I'm comparing actual time behind the wheel - hours of correct driving vs hours (well minutes) of incorrect driving. Do the math yourself, take total hours behind the wheel and divide by the accident rate, like I did. You'll get the same results. Depending on your assumptions anywhere from 99.999 to 99.99999% correct driving by humans. > Even robotaxis aren't going to run constantly. Again, I'm not comparing constantly, I'm comparing actual hours behind the wheel.
      - iso1210 5y ago
        84 billion hours of driving[0] for 35,485 deaths[1]. That's one death per 2.4 million hours, so that's an indicator of the magnitude that's needed before even talking about it. That number also means no situations where the computer gives up and hands control back to the driver. If autonomous cars can never hand back (at most stopping legally, safely and out of traffic) and cause 1 death per 10 million hours, that would seem about right. [0] https://www.volpe.dot.gov/news/how-much-time-do-americans-spend-behind-wheel https://www.volpe.dot.gov/news/how-much-time-do-americans-sp... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
dmitriid 5y ago
And then you forget to click a "don't use autopilot" setting buried in three levels of settings, and will pay for a month-worth of driving.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  Seems to me it would be difficult to not notice your car driving itself.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    It doesn't matter if the car drives itself or not. What matters is how money is withdrawn. It's enough to have "on/off" somewhere in settings, and have it "enabled" even if you don't use it. Good grief, there are countless articles even here on HN about dark patterns where people are tricked into subscribing to something, or being unable to unsusbcribe except when going through the hoops. But sure, a car manufacturer charging maney for a subscription will never ever do that as long as you "don't use a feature".

SamBam 5y ago

You're inventing hypotheticals to say why they're going to charge you more, without evidence. Pay-per-minute autonomous driving is far more like old pay-per-minute phone plans than it is mystery-AWS-data-charges. You know when it's driving and when it's not. There's no unforeseeable per-lambda charges about it.

lp0_on_fire 5y ago
I think it's reasonable to worry that WV or another company might start charging a variable rate for different "types" of autonomous driving. Pay-per-minute phone plans could be just as mysterious when you factored in long distance and peak usage hours. It's not a huge logical leap to think that a subscription based service like this could lead to things such as: You want to travel between point A and B several miles apart in rural Kansas on a straight road with a road density of 2 vehicles per mile? "Sure, that's 8.50 an hour." Oh, you want to travel between Newark and Manhattan in the middle of a snowstorm? "That will be 15 an hour because we have to cover the costs for the real-time feed of data from our weather and control center" Oh, you have a camper, too? "That's an additional 2 bucks an hour for our towing package" Oh, you're traveling across state lines and the state over imposes an additional tax on autonomous driving. "we need to charge you 8.75 to cover the tax and our costs but only in that state."
dmitriid 5y ago
> You're inventing hypotheticals to say why they're going to charge you more, without evidence. Ah yes. There's no evidence. Except the countless instances of dark patterns everywhere on the web tricking into you paying money. Countless instances where you can't cancel a subscription, and have to go through multiple hoops to do it. Countless instances when there's a runaway billing in a SaaS that leaves people with huge bills. But sure. These are all just "hypotheticals", and not the reality how the absolute vast majority of subscription business works. > You know when it's driving and when it's not. There's no unforeseeable per-lambda charges about it. Ah yes. Because of course it will be as simple as "when it's on, it will be charged", and not "when an obscure setting is on, you will be charged, regardless of whether it will be self-driving or not".

Larrikin 5y ago

There is very little reason to believe Tesla will be best let alone first when it comes to self driving technology. I personally feel they are backing the wrong technology and will ultimately be unsuccessful without LIDAR sensors like Waymo and other startups and the beta testers with current model Teslas are going to ultimately end up disappointed. I don't own a car currently (nor any Tesla stock) so I'm happy to wait and see if I'm wrong or right.

vardump 5y ago
Tesla can already generate a pretty good "lidar point cloud" out of just camera input. But we'll see.
- jsight 5y ago
  One issue with Tesla's approach is that they do not have enough cameras to do this at every angle. Its going to be especially tough in parking lots, as they have very poor coverage of the road directly beneath them. Mobileye's camera based point cloud approach appears to be much more robust.
  - vardump 5y ago
    Why would the car need to see the road directly beneath while parking? Because of positional error (drift) or what? It should know the painted markings from earlier frames. Good point though. I'd like Tesla to add more cameras.