Comment by SoftTalker
21 hours ago
> Rivian says it will charge $49.99 a month, or $2,500 up front, versus Tesla’s $99 per month for its rival system, which is somewhat misleadingly called Full Self-Driving (Supervised), or FSD. Mercedes, meanwhile, plans to charge $3,950 for a three-year subscription for the forthcoming MB.Drive Assist Pro
If and when FSD systems become a reality and are safer than human drivers, I would expect that regulators will require them on all cars, just as they did reversing cameras, airbags, automated emergency braking, and other once-optional safety features.
I think insurance companies might beat the regulators, in terms of incentivizing safer vehicles via discounts.
Which would then offset these monthly subscriptions by car companies.
why wouldn't the FSD company itself integrate into insurance? they have the error rate data which is king for insurance. seems like free real estate.
Hmm, that would mean forcing every car sold to be controllable remotely by a corporation. Sounds like something regulators would indeed do, but also, doesn’t sound too great for consumers, to put it mildly
I think given how far companies like XPeng are with their systems in China. This is more a question of "when" than "if" with the when part narrowed to a time range of perhaps 2027-2029. Xpeng seems to be planning for 2027. Not in the US of course but the rest of the world is a big place.
I expect that by the mid 2030s this will be widely used across most car markets in both L2 driver assist form and L4 style autonomous taxis active in most large cities on all continents. L4/L5 level driving for privately owned cars might trail that a bit but I think the technical arguments against that are rapidly evaporating as well. The arguments are increasingly about regulation, insurance, liability, etc. I think the Chinese are a bit more pragmatic on this front and more likely to just get this done domestically by the early 2030s and will be deploying this globally by the mid 2030s. The only question real question is whether the US and Europe will do that before or after them and whether that will be with their own tech or somebody else's.
Rivian seems to have all the right tech and strategy.
If it gets too embedded into the revenues of the car companies, regulators are going to have a hard time making it required without a subscription. It could be that you just either have a car with a monthly payment or you don't.
Or just make the car more expensive up front? That's what all the other regulations do.
My 2025 model 3 has driven me over 95% of my last thousand miles. I'm frankly surprised it isn't more, but I'm not the only driver of the car.
It's very obvious to me that FSD is a reality already, usually from parking spot to parking spot. And it at least feels much safer than I am driving, especially since I can get tired, etc
Out of curiosity, do you live in a place that gets heavy snow? I've always felt that FSD would struggle to handle heavy snow fall, roads with snow banks on the sides and difficult driving/braking conditions in the snow and on ice patches.
For any doubters: using a 2025 model is a key detail here. It's the latest hardware version of the self driving computer. The older cars on the road are stuck with significantly worse FSD software because the hardware is far too weak.
FSD 14 lite, which is now available for the HW3 (~2019-2023) Teslas, is surprisingly good. I have a HW3 and HW4, and while HW3 isn't as confident and competent as HW4, it's good enough that I don't mind it anymore. My wife was planning on trading in the HW3 for a new Model Y next year, and now she might just wait a few more years.
I have a 2020 M3 on HW3 with v14 lite and it's very good. But even v12 was pretty good. I drove an HW4 as a loaner and did not notice a significant difference. I think the big difference would be on the long-tail of edge conditions, but I'm not sure.
>I would expect that regulators will require them on all cars
That assumes that suppliers are available to affordably add it.
So far Tesla is the only company remotely close to unsupervised self-driving that doesn't add $1000s to the BoM cost of the car.
> So far Tesla is the only company remotely close to unsupervised self-driving that doesn't add $1000s to the BoM cost of the car.
What makes you think it doesn't? All those cameras, the expensive chips and cooling for them, and redundancy for all the systems don't come free.
For a Tesla, the estimates are around $2K. For a Waymo, the same estimates are ~$25K (down from $125K!!!). There's not a clear timeline for Waymo-style kit at a price consumers can afford and in a form factor they'd accept.
(FWIW, the business story for Waymo has never been about its hardware making its way to consumers. It's always been about whether Waymo continues to run its own taxi service or leases out hardware and operations to other taxi businesses).
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The God's Eye B system of BYD adds under $600 to the BoM.
The 5 millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors are $100-150. LiDAR is $150-200. The 12 cameras, control unit, and 300 TOPs of computing is $150-200. This computing is comparable to what Tesla puts on their consumer cars, and the sensors suite is much more extensive. (The current robotaxis have about the same computing power as the consumer cars but a lot more RAM).
Right, but God's Eye B isn't anywhere near good enough for unsupervised self-driving. The hardware isn't the issue; the software just isn't in the same league as Tesla FSD.
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It's too cheap if it requires updates
Sure. So long as I don't have to pay for it.
Which will pose an interesting problem; we’ll have to pay a subscription to legally be allowed to drive our car on the road. As much as I’m excited for autonomous driving I’m not excited for the legal implications that follow