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Comment by Kirby64 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Cybercab has double the RAM and a bit more memory bandwidth, but otherwise it's the same 8 external mono RGB cameras.

It's maybe $1.5K of BoM total for the chip, memory, and cameras.

Tesla is also able to save on components that are no longer needed: steering wheel and steering column, rear window mirror, control to change gears etc. I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper to make those cars than standard ones.

>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.

There is no such data for Cybercab (AI4.5). We only have data on that for AI4.

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