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Comment by Sendotsh | Hacker News Reader

> if Silicon Valley cornered the market.

Your SelfDryv subscription has expired. Please renew via the SelfDryv app (available on iOS only) to continue using your car. Subscribe today for only $99/year (for our 5k Mile Package) + $20/year per each passenger.

Notice: After an incredible 12 months, SelfDryv will be ceasing operations in 30 days due to unforeseen circumstances. Please use up any SelfDryv Mile Credits you have within those 30 days, before your SelfDryv vehicle stops functioning. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, but we are currently unable to offer refunds or credits for your vehicle. Please see the attached document for alternative vehicles you can purchase going forward.

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We apologize for the SelfDryv experience disruption experienced by some[0] customers earlier this week[1]. We experienced technical difficulties during a server migration that may[2] have degraded customer experience. The server migration exposed an incorrect dependency between the SelfDryv consumer hardware the the SelfDryv cloud services[3]. We have issued a fix[4] and offer 5 miles credits to any customer who was effected.

[0] About 100%

[1] 54 hours spanning Monday through Wednesday.

[2] ^H absolutely most certainly did

[3] Turns out part of the car's A/C UI dynamically fetches JavaScript on startup and our outage stopped serving JS, so A/C module failed to load. The worker thread that spawns the rest of the car's functionality freezes if the A/C module fails to respond. I guess we never tested that, I mean our internal network is pretty reliable, you know?

[4] We moved the JavaScript to a CDN so that means 100% availability. Presumably eventually we'll rewrite the entire client stack anyway thus implicitly killing this horrible dependency.

Also due to the fact that you forgot your password once and your last name sounds vaguely Ukrainian our AI has determined that your account should be shadowbanned, which means the app will appear to function as normal but the car will only drive in small circles around your home.

When you contact customer support our reps will explain that it must be something in their system but they can’t see your account and will transfer you to a manager at which point the call will disconnect.

This gives me am idea for a horror story ...

We also apologize for remote-updating your car while you were driving on the highway and for the subsequent pile up but do note that we have disclaimed such events in your 238 page EULA that you clicked through after you purchased the subscription.

Har har. I do appreciate that this whole area is a rich vein to mine for humor, but I think remote updates will continue to be installed only when cars are in park.

> Har Har

I am not at all trying to be funny.

> I think remote updates will continue to be installed only when cars are in park.

What you think doesn't really matter, and you are wrong about the 'continue' bit.

But it would be good if we had some laws around this stuff stipulating that software updates of moving vehicles are strictly forbidden, it seems like common sense, unfortunately not everybody has it.

For $99/year I would subscribe to this service in a second. Where can I sign up for SelfDryv? ;-)

That's $99/year after buying the car from them.

People joke. But wouldn’t surprise me if whatever self-driving systems eventually come to the market will require subscriptions. And most likely subscriptions well in excess of $99 per year.

BMW started charging $80 a year just to plug your phone (CarPlay).

While this is said in jest, it might become the reality. Cars are designed for life time of more than 10 years, much longer for trucks, buses and commercial vehicles.

Not 100% sure if any startups are planning this far ahead in the future.

Like some IOT devices, servers will be shutdown and cars will just stop working.

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