Seems like the kind of problems that would be amortized by scale. Anyone running a fleet won’t need to assemble one set of tooling per robot.
Thus my question - what scale are they targeting. At some level of sales their expected costs are right. However if demand is a lot more than they expect it could probably scale down to $10k, maybe less, while if it is less costs go up...
It's extremely common for dev tooling to be extremely expensive, even for widgets that sell for a few bucks at the retail level.
- Ford F-150 base price: $39,645.
- Ford F-150 Raptor R: $115,015.