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Comment by haney | Hacker News Reader

So I'm not up on the Lidar industry but $12k for a sensor seems really expensive, but then again from my casual observations Lidar is really expensive. Is there a physical / first principles reason this is true or is it just really new technology?

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The most general answer to your question is Peter Drucker's (famous management guru) observation that every doubling of production of an item (over the lifetime, not yearly) resulted in a cost reduction of 20-30%.

So right now, with very few LIDARs produced, we have a high price, which will start dropping as more are produced.

You might find this interesting: a single transistor used to sell for roughly the equivalent of $8 USD in today's money; today the cheapest ones are 6 Cents USD (price checked today from Mouser.com) in qty 1 pricing...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/h...

At quantity 1, though, most of the cost is from the person who has to package it. Qty 100 will give you a much more accurate price.

You can buy 9.6 billion transistors for AU$599 (US$430) in the form of an AMD Threadripper 12 Core 1920X.

That's AU$0.000,000,062,395,833 (US$0.000,000,044,791,667) per transistor;

Each unit has 16 or 64 little laser rangefinders in it. They all have to have uniform response (which, from their pictures, Ouster hasn't achieved yet) and be lined up properly. Eventually somebody will develop high volume ways to do that, but in the prototype stage they're probably hand assembled.

Image orthicons for TV cameras once cost $10,000 each, and color cameras needed three of them, plus another $50K or so of electronics to drive them. Today a cell phone camera costs about $10.

I'm not either, but I think there's no reason for them not to charge a lot of money. I expect goal is to advance their tech as rapidly as possible while claiming mindshare. The people buying this stuff are generally swimming in investor money, perceived value is often related to price, and it's much easier to lower prices than raise them. So as long as they're selling enough units to get useful real-world feedback that supports their development, in their shoes I'd basically gouge people.

Presumably the price is currently dominated by the effects of low volume production. The market is r&d for new products. When those start going to mass production, then this part can also go to mass production, bringing the price down.

Equivalent Velodyne lidar (the ones commonly used) cost 64K each.

And no, it's my understanding that it's just a matter of volume.

If that were true, they would already be selling a zillion of them.

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