Comment by digitalPhonix
2 days ago
Each Waymo vehicle is probably close to half a million USD in just hardware cost.
I don’t think fixed route transport infrastructure is going to have trouble competing on efficiency.
2 days ago
Each Waymo vehicle is probably close to half a million USD in just hardware cost.
I don’t think fixed route transport infrastructure is going to have trouble competing on efficiency.
The hardware costs for Waymo are estimated at $30k.
Source?
They were targeting $7.5k for their in house honeycomb lidars and they have 12 of them - that’s 90k already.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22644370/waymo-lidar-stop...
They also aren’t close to the $7.5k target (there isn’t any public source for that so you’ll have to take my word for it).
Also $30k wouldn’t even cover the base vehicle.
This is an estimation for the self-driving hardware cost (computers, LIDAR, sensors). It does not include the base car price, as it can be easily optimized down to almost nothing (sub $10k).
The price is somewhat of a guess, several years ago, the hardware in Waymo was priced at $130k by Munro&Associates. But since then the cost of the LIDAR sensors fell by 90% or so, reducing the main expense.
And Baidu has cars on the road that cost $30k for the _entire_ car. So presumably, so even a couple of pricier sensors won't affect the estimate too much.
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Are you talking about raw material costs? Or is that one of these extrapolations of if we scale everything to millions of cars and realise no inefficiencies and nobody making any money in the supply chain?
I'm talking about the current cost of the self-driving system, that is already produced by companies that charge a significant markup. With volume, it will go down more.
I'm not including the base vehicle in the cost. It's highly variable, and can be as low as $10k for small personal intra-city taxis.
China has already launched a $30k taxi: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/05/14/baidu-...
This _completely_ blows any transit out of the competition. Literally nothing can come even close in the end-to-end efficiency.
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