I can't help but think of an absurd situation where your subscription ends mid use and results in a crash. Like I'm sure the engineers have thought of this but the image of someone cruising down the road and getting a popup to enter their payment info before careening off a cliff is just so humorous... until the horrifying possibility that it could be reality sinks in.
Once they are established they will require a subscription, or they will stop support after a few years so you have to buy a new car or pay more to get extended support.
> Once they are established they will require a subscription, or they will stop support after a few years so you have to buy a new car or pay more to get extended support
> its how vendor lock in and deceptive pricing work
Which doesn’t work for a commodity. If self-driving fails to commoditise, you’re right. It currently looks like it’s going to be commoditises, with every car-industrial cluster having a couple options for manufacturers.
Self driving is not a commodity, because it is not fungible - you cannot take BYD's self driving and put in in your Tesla. Cars themselves are not fungible either although at the moment they are reasonably competitive markets for cheap cars (luxury cars less so).
If in two years time Tesla decides they are going to charge a subscription for self driving to work on cars sold before they decided to make it a subscription what do people who have those cars do? They can sell the car (hopefully), give up self driving, or pay up.
There are not that many manufacturers. Maybe few enough for pricing to be oligopolistic rather than perfect.
They may all adopt a subscription model which will let them sell cars cheaper. Maybe even at a loss - in much the same way that smart TVs are sold as a loss because of the value of the income generated by data collection. Most people do not understand the true cost of ongoing subscriptions so its quite likely to win if cars to cheap as a result.
I paid for FSD the first month it was offered monthly. Was so bad I wanted my money back but couldn’t figure out how to get Tesla to refund. Feel worse for those who paid the full $8k
I have never driven a Tesla, so this is all anecdotal.
Some of my (extended) neighbors are members of a family that live near each other. One sister bought a Tesla. The brother who lived down the block laughed at her because politics. Despite that, within a year he had bought one as well. Their parents test drove it a few times and were critical about how it drove weird. But now, after about 9 months, their father mentioned in passing that he ordered one. Another brother mentioned that he would sell his Maxus for a Tesla if he could afford to.
Until recently, one had a Chevy, one a Hyundai, one a Maxus and one an ancient Subaru.
I have never seen such buy-in with any other brand, and that is despite the toxicity of the Tesla CEO. I wouldn't be so quick to write them off.
I mean, at least in the U.S., an "FSD System" can't (yet) be held fully liable and there's not enough legal precedent for it (atm) even if it could.
Thus, if you drive in the U.S., you're both stupid and irresponsible if you utilize any "FSD" system while you're behind the wheel. Note that this legally distinct from "autonomous self-driving" like Waymo.
I have zero doubt we'll eventually get there, but it's going to be quite some time (over a decade?) for real FSD to be ubiquitous enough for the requisite traffic law changes and for this stuff to have gone through enough legal challenges in the various state courts.
Stupid and irresponsible driver here. It drives quite well and saves me considerable mental energy on every drive I make now. If it gets into a wreck I know I’m liable, but in years of using it, that hasn’t happened. So why not enjoy the more relaxing drives now?
I mean, if you've got an audience who are willing to pay upfront for vapourware, might as well try having them pay monthly for vapourware instead, I suppose.
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