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Full Self Driving FSD - Game Changer or Gimmick?

ChrissyOne

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I've seen plenty of discussion about how full self driving will be a huge game changer for car makers in the coming years, but I can't seem to get my head around how much of an impact this will be for average drivers. Setting aside robo-taxis and other commercial applications for the moment, I'm talking about FSD for private, consumer model cars.
The cost seems like the biggest challenge. An additional upfront cost of $10k or more, or a monthly fee of $400+ seems like a huge price to pay to not drive the new car you just bought. Maybe I'm too American in my thinking, but isn't a big part of the joy of car ownership is actually, you know, driving it..? I can certainly see an auto-pilot, lane assist feature being useful, but are regular people really going to pay extra for full auto?

To wit:
https://electrek.co/2021/08/31/tesla-survey-take-rate-full-self-driving-package/

"Now a survey of over 17,000 Tesla buyers shows that the Tesla Full Self-Driving take rate worldwide is only at about 11%"

Eleven percent still seems high to me, but maybe that's possible for a worldwide statistic. It's still too low for so many EV stock analysts (even those not named Cathie Wood) to be talking about FSD as THE game changing factor in EV growth.

So what do you think? Would you pay more for FSD? Or, like crab-walk and tank-turn, is it a parlor trick that you'd do once to show off to friends, and probably never touch again?
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I could take a hell of a lot of taxi rides for $10,000.
 

Autolycus

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I've seen plenty of discussion about how full self driving will be a huge game changer for car makers in the coming years, but I can't seem to get my head around how much of an impact this will be for average drivers. Setting aside robo-taxis and other commercial applications for the moment, I'm talking about FSD for private, consumer model cars.
The cost seems like the biggest challenge. An additional upfront cost of $10k or more, or a monthly fee of $400+ seems like a huge price to pay to not drive the new car you just bought. Maybe I'm too American in my thinking, but isn't a big part of the joy of car ownership is actually, you know, driving it..? I can certainly see an auto-pilot, lane assist feature being useful, but are regular people really going to pay extra for full auto?

To wit:
https://electrek.co/2021/08/31/tesla-survey-take-rate-full-self-driving-package/

"Now a survey of over 17,000 Tesla buyers shows that the Tesla Full Self-Driving take rate worldwide is only at about 11%"

Eleven percent still seems high to me, but maybe that's possible for a worldwide statistic. It's still too low for so many EV stock analysts (even those not named Cathie Wood) to be talking about FSD as THE game changing factor in EV growth.

So what do you think? Would you pay more for FSD? Or, like crab-walk and tank-turn, is it a parlor trick that you'd do once to show off to friends, and probably never touch again?
I agree that I don't think most people are going to be forking over $10k for the software, above the price of the car. But will FSD eliminate one of the greatest costs associated with the current taxi/ride-share business model (i.e. the human driver)? If so, the cost of a ride-share should drop, which may cause people to re-think whether car ownership makes the right financial sense for themselves.

So, it's game changing for the industry because it has the potential to completely overhaul the way we think about vehicle usage and ownership. And ultimately, it's gamechanging in a potentially catastrophic way to vehicle manufacturers, if millions of people decide they no longer need to own their own vehicle but instead rely on a shared vehicle.
 

Inkedsphynx

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This assumes that FSD-style systems will cost that kind of money over the long term. The surcharge is just the same early-adopter surcharge you pay for any new technology.

After it becomes more ubiquitous, the cost will drop and eventually it will be standard.

Will I miss driving a car? Yes. I'll probably still do it some of the time myself. Am I incredibly excited for the possibilities that something like FSD opens up? Oh yea.

As adoption rates uptick, we'll see all sorts of driving efficiencies come our way that we cannot get now. You know how you're driving down the highway and for no particular reason it seems you have to slow WAY down all of a sudden, but then traffic is flowing perfectly again? Those snaking slowdowns go away once we have most of us, if not all of us, using automated driving systems.

Once we are able to trust a system enough that I can sit in the back seat and read a book, get some work done, or make out like a teenager, I'll happily ditch driving myself everywhere.

The impact that will be had on traffic patterns will be amazing. We're not there yet, either in terms of the software capabilities, adoption rates, or public perception, but it is coming and it'll probably come pretty fast.
 
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ChrissyOne

ChrissyOne

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So, it's game changing for the industry because it has the potential to completely overhaul the way we think about vehicle usage and ownership. And ultimately, it's gamechanging in a potentially catastrophic way to vehicle manufacturers, if millions of people decide they no longer need to own their own vehicle but instead rely on a shared vehicle.
I think it will certainly be a factor. But it depends on how the execution of that will pan out. People didn't stop buying RVs when Cruise America started renting them. I think for urban residents it will certainly be a huge factor, but (again I'm being American here) for anyone outside city centers, I think it's going to be less of a factor.

I can get an Uber *right now* with a human driver. It will make a huge difference to Uber when they don't have to pay a driver, but it's not going to make must difference to me as a customer. The product, in that sense, already exists. Do you think Uber is going to dramatically decrease their prices when they don't have to pay drivers? Maybe. Will that be enough to further change my habits as a consumer? Not sure about that.

When I used to travel (in the Before Times) I would use bike rental systems to get around. The Velib in Paris is great on paper, you can easily hop on a electric bike and go anywhere in the city. But in actual practice it's not all kir and baguettes. Sometimes all the bikes are broken in some way, and you often have to walk around to a few stations to get a good one. It's marginally better than walking shorter distances, but it's usually better to take le métro.

For personal uses like going to the beach for the day, I just don't see robo-taxis filling this need well. For daily uses like commuting, it's actually better to build public transit, but Americans have a pathological aversion to that, because they like the freedom of going wherever they want. Europeans already have fantastic public transit, so there market for robo-taxis might also be limited.

There is certainly a market for this, but I still don't see it as a "game changing" market.
 

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ChrissyOne

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The impact that will be had on traffic patterns will be amazing. We're not there yet, either in terms of the software capabilities, adoption rates, or public perception, but it is coming and it'll probably come pretty fast.
On freeways, this might be true, but it will really only come into its own when the VAST majority of cars are self driving.

In cities, FSD is not a magic bullet as long as there are pedestrians crossing streets. We could theoretically get rid of traffic lights and make all the cars thread through each other magically, but then we've completely given up our streets to cars, which smarter cities like Barcelona are undoing with superblocks.
 

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I think it will certainly be a factor. But it depends on how the execution of that will pan out. People didn't stop buying RVs when Cruise America started renting them. I think for urban residents it will certainly be a huge factor, but (again I'm being American here) for anyone outside city centers, I think it's going to be less of a factor.

I can get an Uber *right now* with a human driver. It will make a huge difference to Uber when they don't have to pay a driver, but it's not going to make must difference to me as a customer. The product, in that sense, already exists. Do you think Uber is going to dramatically decrease their prices when they don't have to pay drivers? Maybe. Will that be enough to further change my habits as a consumer? Not sure about that.

When I used to travel (in the Before Times) I would use bike rental systems to get around. The Velib in Paris is great on paper, you can easily hop on a electric bike and go anywhere in the city. But in actual practice it's not all kir and baguettes. Sometimes all the bikes are broken in some way, and you often have to walk around to a few stations to get a good one. It's marginally better than walking shorter distances, but it's usually better to take le métro.

For personal uses like going to the beach for the day, I just don't see robo-taxis filling this need well. For daily uses like commuting, it's actually better to build public transit, but Americans have a pathological aversion to that, because they like the freedom of going wherever they want. Europeans already have fantastic public transit, so there market for robo-taxis might also be limited.

There is certainly a market for this, but I still don't see it as a "game changing" market.
Can't disagree with any of that very strongly, especially not the part about public transit being better than individual vehicles/pods. The pandemic will likely put a bit airbrake on public transit investment, unfortunately.

I really just want to know why I don't have my own Rosey maid robot or a flying car yet! It turns out predicting the future is really hard!
 

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Gimmick.

To have FSD you will need 2 things: Cars be able to communicate to break deadlocks, and infrastructure that supports it. Everything we have now, including the Tesla falsely erroneously named AutoPilot/FSD, depends on road markings and cameras. Both are not 100%, try FSD on a road with poor markings, it's a scary roller coaster without tracks and then disengages. Cameras and Radars are great, but they still have flaws when trying to identify parked cars and static objects; that is the reason for some of the accidents. So everything we have now, requires a driver, and in my personal experience it was very stressful because now I had to keep the same focus as before, but with the added stress of trying to calculate the possible ways the cars might behave abnormally and anticipate my reaction.
 
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ChrissyOne

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I really just want to know why I don't have my own Rosey maid robot or a flying car yet! It turns out predicting the future is really hard!
:giggle:
I can tell you why you don't have your flying car yet - Terrorists. They say "never say never," well I'm saying NEVER will you be able to pilot your own car freely in the sky. We already have people driving into parades and protests, what would it be like to land your car in a crowded stadium bleacher? MAYBE when we do have FSD, and you tell the Sky-Taxi where you want to go, and it handles all the navigation, then we MIGHT see this happen, but the FAA will not in a million years allow any yahoo to have their own cruise missile.
 

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When FSD is available AND is required for operation on public roads then I see it as being a huge benefit for general transport.
Remove human error, reduce the need for many to own a vehicle, improve traffic flow, etc.

Obviously I'm not talking about early adopters or the current cost of the early adoption rather an established technology which is completely different.

So in its current state (which I think is the conversation?) and for a good while into the future it borderlines gimmick for me.
However IF I can plug in destination and ride in the vehicle without interfacing with it then that would really help some of my back problems I get when driving and would be a big benefit to me.
 

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ChrissyOne

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Gimmick.
So everything we have now, requires a driver, and in my personal experience it was very stressful because now I had to keep the same focus as before, but with the added stress of trying to calculate the possible ways the cars might behave abnormally and anticipate my reaction.
Seriously... I can't relax in a car when another HUMAN is driving that I don't massively trust. There is no way I'm closing my eyes and letting Alexa take the wheel.
 

Inkedsphynx

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I hope this thread still exists in 10 years.

It wasn't that long ago that EVs themselves were 'gimmicks'. How many other 'gimmicks' have we seen take over the world in even the lifetime of those on this forum? Cell phones. Internet. Cryptocurrencies.

Every one of those 'gimmicks' had people saying many of the things being said here. I'm willing to prognosticate that full self-driving vehicles are not a gimmick and within my lifetime they will be ubiquitous and resolve many of the challenges being pointed out in this thread.

Pedestrians and shitty road lines? That's just a technology problem. Technology moves pretty fast. It won't take long to solve those problems.

There is the cart/horse issue of needing the demand to drive infra and the infra to enable demand, but that's no different than *any other advancement*. It will happen, just wait.
 

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On freeways, this might be true, but it will really only come into its own when the VAST majority of cars are self driving.
This. FSD can only be fully practical and safe when, really, all cars in a given traffic pattern are participating under the control of a single protocol, where all vehicles are managed using a predictable flow control approach. Introducing even a single free radical/human driver/a-hole into the mix could cause catastrophe. This is the single biggest barrier to wide-spread adoption of FSD as anything other than a parlor trick (aka gamble with your life).
 

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That is irrelevant. The OP asked about things as they stand NOW, not in 10 years.

Its not just about road lines, that was one of the issues we are still unable to solve. Snow is another major issue; currently even rain interferes with the system cameras.

In 10 years we will most probably not be on lvl2, but for us to move to higher levels there will be infrastructure changes. Just how electric charging infrastructure started small.
 

Inkedsphynx

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That is irrelevant. The OP asked about things as they stand NOW, not in 10 years.

Its not just about road lines, that was one of the issues we are still unable to solve. Snow is another major issue; currently even rain interferes with the system cameras.

In 10 years we will most probably not be on lvl2, but for us to move to higher levels there will be infrastructure changes. Just how electric charging infrastructure started small.
Try reading the rest of the thread. What I said was entirely relevant. (Hell, read the first sentence of the OP's post - "In the coming years").

I think we'll be farther along in 10 years than level 2. We're there now. Is your stance that we won't make any meaningful improvements in the technology in the next 10 years?
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