Study: $5K Is Self-Driving Car Sweet Spot

Sometimes it's tough to brand sense of the hodgepodge of technologies that currently draw the "self-driving car" buzzword, from lane divergence warning systems all the way up to Tesla Autopilot, not to mention manufacture jargon similar "Level v automation."

Nextcar Bug art So why not organize autonomous driving technologies by how much people think they're worth? That'due south what a group of economists and engineers tried to do in a newspaper published in March, CNET reports. The model suggests that on boilerplate, Americans are willing to pay a $3,500 premium for a partially automated motorcar and a $4,900 premium for a fully automated one.

For comparison, $4,900 for full automation is very like to what Tesla charges for its almost advanced Autopilot, which costs a trivial over $v,000.

The researchers' model is based on interviews with 27 potential car buyers in New York City and upstate New York. As yous might expect, just four of the New York Metropolis residents collection a machine every mean solar day, while all of the 15 upstate New Yorkers commuted via car daily. The 2 groups perceived similar benefits from cocky-driving cars, from increased productivity and safety to easier and quicker parking.

Afterward crunching the numbers, the researchers institute a fairly even segmentation of the demand for automation: about ane-third of people are keenly interested and willing to pay $x,000 or more for self-driving features, one-third are clashing, and the balance isn't willing to pay for automation at any cost.

Equally the researchers notation, withal, one of the key problems with such a study is that it'due south based on a hypothetical purchase scenario: their study participants weren't actually ownership a automobile, and even if they were, in that location are very few models on the market that come up with total automation on the level of the Tesla Autopilot.

Nevertheless, it'due south good to institute a peer-reviewed benchmark for how much self-driving tech should cost at this early phase in its development. If information technology follows the cheapening blueprint of almost other technology (and the government continues to urge its inclusion in new cars), you might one mean solar day exist able to do yoga in your Toyota Corolla on the highway for far less than $5,000.