4 ms·

The technology is pretty amazing, but does anyone else feel like we (the public) got duped? What I wanted was for my own car to drive itself so I could relax a

by habosa 3y ago

The technology is pretty amazing, but does anyone else feel like we (the public) got duped? What I wanted was for my own car to drive itself so I could relax and make better use of car time. I also wanted some new novel ways of interacting with cars to make them feel more like public transit that would be enabled by driverless technology. What we got was ... SciFi Uber. We are not going to be allowed to own the cars, and hiring them for trips will not be any cheaper or easier than Uber. And most will be owned by big companies with motives besides transportation. The driverless future was so exciting in 2013. Now it's just ... there.

kalleboo 3y ago
This is why Tesla was valued beyond the top 10 car companies combined - the idea was to kill the idea of people just buying their cars and make it an overpriced subscription
- samstave 3y ago
  Dont we call those "leases"
browningstreet 3y ago
It’s not actually here yet so economies haven’t actually been employed. It’s still a tech beta, though I’m not sure our Teslas will ever really do the thing.
- sixQuarks 3y ago
  Are you not aware of how FSD beta performs in SF? There are several videos where Tesla FSD beats cruise and Waymo in getting to random destinations, with no interventions.
  - browningstreet 3y ago
    FSD Beta still runs on the old fork of the Tesla software, and nothing "good" has been merged into the newer branch that I'm running (the one that supports Apple Music), and on long road trips, the phantom braking (which I've surmised happens mostly on undulations on a rising or falling road) is still a huge bother/risk... and the fact that Tesla hasn't back-ported whatever fixes they claim exist for phantom braking with AutoPilot means.. it doesn't exist yet. And it's been a problem for years and years now. Also, my Tesla on AutoPilot freaks the f*ck out in large suburban intersections where the roads all go very straight -- it'll jump from lane 1 to lane 2 in the middle of the intersection. Not sure if SF has big intersections of the sort I'm talking about, but Sacramento, Reno, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and LA certainly do. Again, something they could fix if the fix was real, and for all the drivers out there smacking their stalk and AutoPiloting. And lastly, on the highway, where the right lanes expand and contract with onboarding and exiting lanes the car tracks to the right solid line and not the un-moving dotted line to the left of the car. So the car is constantly jumping left and right as the "center" of the lane changes (because the width of the lane is changing), when the lane expands to allow for merge-lane traffic from those entering and exiting the freeway. Two of these examples are on highways, which are ostensibly easier challenges than city streets. Where's the rapid evolution of the tech? Not in product scope of the features people with Teslas are using day to day.
  - vasilipupkin 3y ago
    yeah, but there is going to be plenty of situations it can't handle. So you really can't relax, you need to be vigilant to take over. So not clear what the point of it is then
ChadNauseam 3y ago
I don't feel like the tech is there yet to start selling the cars to consumers. Waymo only recently got permission to start doing rides for money right? And in the early stages, scifi Uber makes way more sense than trying to sell the cars directly. > hiring them for trips will not be any cheaper or easier than Uber Why wouldn't they be? When the price of a business's inputs goes down, the profit-maximizing thing for them do is lower the price of their outputs.
nradov 3y ago
You can own the car if you want to. Mercedes-Benz is about to start selling level 3 autonomous vehicles to consumers. https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a722043c01a0c3-conditionally-automated-driving-mercedes-benz-drive-pilot-further-expands-us-availability-to-the-countrys-most-populous-state-through-california-certification https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a...
jefftk 3y ago
Different companies have different visions, but "driverless car that you own" is a goal some have. For example, if you buy a Mercedes with DrivePilot then in approved locations (including Germany, California [1], and Nevada [2]) you can legally and safely read, watch a video, or play a game while in the driver's seat. It's only Level 3, and can only do highways under 40mph (traffic jams), but it shows that this is still an active direction. [1] https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a722043c01a0c3-conditionally-automated-driving-mercedes-benz-drive-pilot-further-expands-us-availability-to-the-countrys-most-populous-state-through-california-certification https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-pilot-level-3-approved-nevada https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-p...
taeric 3y ago
On the other side of that, "hiring an Uber" even several times a month to do a longer trip that you can't manage in any other way is much cheaper than any ownership situation for the same cars. Heck, you almost certainly save in recovered space from not owning the car. Going down the path, though, as someone that has extensively used public transit in every US city I've lived in for my adult life, I'm curious how you envision "more like public transit" looking? I get that you wanted better use of "car time", but I also have to confess I don't really know what that means. Even public transit is mostly a place for you to maybe read a book. If you are super hyper and have a long commute, you can consider some programming/drawing/writing. Most anything else, though, will be pretty difficult to pull off in a highly confined space.
- samstave 3y ago
  I was a daily biker in San Francisco for more than a decade... no car.... I had ZIPCAR and one month I took one on a trip and on several other excursions - and the bill for ZIPCAR that month was $850. for like minimal time... NO WAY was that "an affordable option"
  - taeric 3y ago
    You would be surprised what people are regularly paying for a car. 850 is probably on par with what the parking/storage costs alone are. Those are almost certainly "priced in" to most houses, but there is no reason you couldn't work to reclaim a lot of that space. More, I don't know enough about ZIPCAR to know how they price in the costs to refill the vehicle between drivers, but depending on how the fuel was managed, that is a 20% chunk of that, easy. Concretely, googling "average monthly car payment", shows that "The average car payment for a new vehicle is $725 monthly, according to first-quarter 2023 data from Experian." So, not as incomparable as I could hope it is.
  - tbdenney 3y ago
    $850 / $12 hour (current hourly rate for Honda CRV in SF) = 70 hours. I wouldn't call that minimal time for a month. Is there a more affordable option for on-demand car rental in SF than $12/hour all-inclusive? Seems quite reasonable to me.
rhyme-boss 3y ago
One possible silver lining would be if governments ordered and managed fleets of self-driving passenger vehicles, as public transport.
ryandrake 3y ago
There seems to be a growing, invisible force working against us, nudging us toward owning less and less and renting more and more. Don't own and maintain your own car! Pay me every time you need a ride somewhere! Don't own your own single family home! Move to the city and rent an apartment from me! Don't own your own computer! Do everything in "the Cloud" and pay me every month for it! Don't own your own media! Pay me monthly to stream it! It's not the future we were all looking forward to.
- samstave 3y ago
  They're not fn invisible! They display their methods all over the place. WEF, Klaus and Hariri are demons.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I'm not sure there's a particular virtue in owning vs. renting or vice versa. It's all situational. I'm certainly going to own my car at home (which I also own). But if I take an even fairly lengthy trip it probably doesn't make sense to buy those things at my destination (though it may make sense to have a more extended arrangement than a typical night-by-night one). If I'm going to watch a movie once it's not clear why I have to own it. I think some people make ownership vs. rental much more of a value-laden decision than it needs to be.
- woah 3y ago
  Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff. Yea it’s the reptilians who created streaming services instead of letting us all continue owning our VCR tapes like the goddamn red blooded Americans we were meant to be. It’s the reptilians who have made people want to live above a grocery store and bike 15 minutes to work instead of driving their Ford F-150 two hours every day from their McMansion and back, and 45 minutes to Wal-Mart.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    > Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff. It's not. The system needs growth, can't have growth if everyone owns reliable things. What you need is people either owning thing that need constant maintenance or straight up renting/leasing everything In France they're preparing a law to build your "own" house on rented land, to "help ease access to home ownership" because land is to expensive. What will happen is that land ownership will be even more concentrated and the average joe will never ever be able to buy land, you'll need to rent the land $$$ a month, with whatever terms (which might or might not change with time)
lm28469 3y ago
> We are not going to be allowed to own the cars You'll own nothing and be happy ;) Everything will be a subscription/lease/rental, your medias, your car, your house, your land, &c.

by habosa 3y ago

kalleboo 3y ago

This is why Tesla was valued beyond the top 10 car companies combined - the idea was to kill the idea of people just buying their cars and make it an overpriced subscription

samstave 3y ago
Dont we call those "leases"

browningstreet 3y ago

It’s not actually here yet so economies haven’t actually been employed. It’s still a tech beta, though I’m not sure our Teslas will ever really do the thing.

sixQuarks 3y ago
Are you not aware of how FSD beta performs in SF? There are several videos where Tesla FSD beats cruise and Waymo in getting to random destinations, with no interventions.
- browningstreet 3y ago
  FSD Beta still runs on the old fork of the Tesla software, and nothing "good" has been merged into the newer branch that I'm running (the one that supports Apple Music), and on long road trips, the phantom braking (which I've surmised happens mostly on undulations on a rising or falling road) is still a huge bother/risk... and the fact that Tesla hasn't back-ported whatever fixes they claim exist for phantom braking with AutoPilot means.. it doesn't exist yet. And it's been a problem for years and years now. Also, my Tesla on AutoPilot freaks the f*ck out in large suburban intersections where the roads all go very straight -- it'll jump from lane 1 to lane 2 in the middle of the intersection. Not sure if SF has big intersections of the sort I'm talking about, but Sacramento, Reno, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and LA certainly do. Again, something they could fix if the fix was real, and for all the drivers out there smacking their stalk and AutoPiloting. And lastly, on the highway, where the right lanes expand and contract with onboarding and exiting lanes the car tracks to the right solid line and not the un-moving dotted line to the left of the car. So the car is constantly jumping left and right as the "center" of the lane changes (because the width of the lane is changing), when the lane expands to allow for merge-lane traffic from those entering and exiting the freeway. Two of these examples are on highways, which are ostensibly easier challenges than city streets. Where's the rapid evolution of the tech? Not in product scope of the features people with Teslas are using day to day.
- vasilipupkin 3y ago
  yeah, but there is going to be plenty of situations it can't handle. So you really can't relax, you need to be vigilant to take over. So not clear what the point of it is then

ChadNauseam 3y ago

I don't feel like the tech is there yet to start selling the cars to consumers. Waymo only recently got permission to start doing rides for money right? And in the early stages, scifi Uber makes way more sense than trying to sell the cars directly. > hiring them for trips will not be any cheaper or easier than Uber Why wouldn't they be? When the price of a business's inputs goes down, the profit-maximizing thing for them do is lower the price of their outputs.

nradov 3y ago

You can own the car if you want to. Mercedes-Benz is about to start selling level 3 autonomous vehicles to consumers. https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a722043c01a0c3-conditionally-automated-driving-mercedes-benz-drive-pilot-further-expands-us-availability-to-the-countrys-most-populous-state-through-california-certification https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a...

jefftk 3y ago

Different companies have different visions, but "driverless car that you own" is a goal some have. For example, if you buy a Mercedes with DrivePilot then in approved locations (including Germany, California [1], and Nevada [2]) you can legally and safely read, watch a video, or play a game while in the driver's seat. It's only Level 3, and can only do highways under 40mph (traffic jams), but it shows that this is still an active direction. [1] https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a722043c01a0c3-conditionally-automated-driving-mercedes-benz-drive-pilot-further-expands-us-availability-to-the-countrys-most-populous-state-through-california-certification https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-1d2a8750850333f086a... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-pilot-level-3-approved-nevada https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-p...

taeric 3y ago

On the other side of that, "hiring an Uber" even several times a month to do a longer trip that you can't manage in any other way is much cheaper than any ownership situation for the same cars. Heck, you almost certainly save in recovered space from not owning the car. Going down the path, though, as someone that has extensively used public transit in every US city I've lived in for my adult life, I'm curious how you envision "more like public transit" looking? I get that you wanted better use of "car time", but I also have to confess I don't really know what that means. Even public transit is mostly a place for you to maybe read a book. If you are super hyper and have a long commute, you can consider some programming/drawing/writing. Most anything else, though, will be pretty difficult to pull off in a highly confined space.

samstave 3y ago
I was a daily biker in San Francisco for more than a decade... no car.... I had ZIPCAR and one month I took one on a trip and on several other excursions - and the bill for ZIPCAR that month was $850. for like minimal time... NO WAY was that "an affordable option"
- taeric 3y ago
  You would be surprised what people are regularly paying for a car. 850 is probably on par with what the parking/storage costs alone are. Those are almost certainly "priced in" to most houses, but there is no reason you couldn't work to reclaim a lot of that space. More, I don't know enough about ZIPCAR to know how they price in the costs to refill the vehicle between drivers, but depending on how the fuel was managed, that is a 20% chunk of that, easy. Concretely, googling "average monthly car payment", shows that "The average car payment for a new vehicle is $725 monthly, according to first-quarter 2023 data from Experian." So, not as incomparable as I could hope it is.
- tbdenney 3y ago
  $850 / $12 hour (current hourly rate for Honda CRV in SF) = 70 hours. I wouldn't call that minimal time for a month. Is there a more affordable option for on-demand car rental in SF than $12/hour all-inclusive? Seems quite reasonable to me.

rhyme-boss 3y ago

One possible silver lining would be if governments ordered and managed fleets of self-driving passenger vehicles, as public transport.

ryandrake 3y ago

There seems to be a growing, invisible force working against us, nudging us toward owning less and less and renting more and more. Don't own and maintain your own car! Pay me every time you need a ride somewhere! Don't own your own single family home! Move to the city and rent an apartment from me! Don't own your own computer! Do everything in "the Cloud" and pay me every month for it! Don't own your own media! Pay me monthly to stream it! It's not the future we were all looking forward to.

samstave 3y ago
They're not fn invisible! They display their methods all over the place. WEF, Klaus and Hariri are demons.
ghaff 3y ago
I'm not sure there's a particular virtue in owning vs. renting or vice versa. It's all situational. I'm certainly going to own my car at home (which I also own). But if I take an even fairly lengthy trip it probably doesn't make sense to buy those things at my destination (though it may make sense to have a more extended arrangement than a typical night-by-night one). If I'm going to watch a movie once it's not clear why I have to own it. I think some people make ownership vs. rental much more of a value-laden decision than it needs to be.
woah 3y ago
Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff. Yea it’s the reptilians who created streaming services instead of letting us all continue owning our VCR tapes like the goddamn red blooded Americans we were meant to be. It’s the reptilians who have made people want to live above a grocery store and bike 15 minutes to work instead of driving their Ford F-150 two hours every day from their McMansion and back, and 45 minutes to Wal-Mart.
- lm28469 3y ago
  > Lol this is straight up conspiracy theory stuff. It's not. The system needs growth, can't have growth if everyone owns reliable things. What you need is people either owning thing that need constant maintenance or straight up renting/leasing everything In France they're preparing a law to build your "own" house on rented land, to "help ease access to home ownership" because land is to expensive. What will happen is that land ownership will be even more concentrated and the average joe will never ever be able to buy land, you'll need to rent the land $$$ a month, with whatever terms (which might or might not change with time)

lm28469 3y ago

> We are not going to be allowed to own the cars You'll own nothing and be happy ;) Everything will be a subscription/lease/rental, your medias, your car, your house, your land, &c.