Comment by heaney-555
1 day ago
>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).
Not sure I'd agree that the Tesla estimate is accurate for the truly driverless versions they've started releasing in Austin. Maybe for the standard ones you can buy. There's reporting on the additional telematics packs that have been added to Model Y cars in their Robotaxi fleet, so who knows what that costs.
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>For a Tesla, the estimates are around $2K
Where are you seeing this? The estimates I've seen all land around $1K.
Teslas also require a couple of OoMs more interventions driving the same distance than Waymos.
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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.
You were talking about the hardware costs to support self-driving. The God's Eye B compute hardware is similar to the compute hardware in current consumer Tesla cars and the sensor hardware is a superset (more cameras plus LiDAR, radar, and ultrasonics), but adds less than $600 to the BoM, which shouldn't be a major barrier to it being mandated on new cars once the software is up to the task.