As others have pointed out there are a TON of OBDII loggers on the market with price points down to <$10. So maybe they make it slightly more universal by interpreting more codes (?) but that seems to be mostly on the software side, this is really still a device manufactured for probably $5.
It seems the real value for comma.ai is just collecting a huge amount of driver data and then selling it to Autonomous car makers or generating algorithms based or the data themselves. Either way, if that's the case why sell it for $88??? sell it at cost ($5) or even give it away for free and just quickly build a huge user base. Am I way off here?
As I understand it users don't necessarily opt in to contributing data to comma's database. So there will be a large subset of hobbyists that just use it to monitor their own driving data privately - these are the users that comma needs to charge up front.
Plus, psychologically it feels like an investment with ROI in "comma points" for those who do contribute their data, with some vague promise of a reward later when someone (who?) decides to purchase comma points. So the upfront cost is justified.
It seems the real value for comma.ai is just collecting a huge amount of driver data and then selling it to Autonomous car makers or generating algorithms based or the data themselves. Either way, if that's the case why sell it for $88??? sell it at cost ($5) or even give it away for free and just quickly build a huge user base. Am I way off here?