If they can pull that off and patent it and get a cut of everybody else doing it or block them from doing it at all then the price is justified. Otherwise they'll just be some tiny volume auto maker.
They license it and give it away with several hundred dollar gadgets. Seems surprising that an auto manufacturer wouldn't do the same with their tens-or-hundreds-of-thousand dollars products.
That is also a very reasonable hypothesis. It would be interesting to know the economics in this case, if that turned out to be true. Spinning up an entire automotive engineering R&D division seems like a very expensive way to generate patents.
You make a good point. If they go the route of just selling the technology to existing car companies, then it's very likely that they'll spend more time on those efforts than producing their own vehicles. If they can get the price on their cars to match that of the average vehicle, they'll be a staple for sure.
Things that are that price point end up just getting acquired by auto manufacturers since the tech isn't used anywhere else, and they can run the price down by owning it and producing it at scale / having some competitive advantage temporarily.
Yes, I just don't want to pay all of it myself. I just want to pay the marginal cost of making it. Let the automaker invest said millions (really billions over all the individual components) into the design and manufacture.
Traditional manufacturer. Saying "we're a tech company over and over" isn't going to make the global ASP for cars double, and they would ultimately need both that, and grabbing an unrealistically large part of the market, to justify their current price.
(The solar business is even worse; that's basically a generic product and should be expected to have extremely low margins in the long term)
I, and I suspect many others, would still pay $40K for a specialty base model which would only cost $30K if it sold in mass-market quantities.
Large companies in oligopolic positions won't try to produce those sorts of products, because it's risky and they have no reason to innovate or seek untapped markets.
It feels like it would be possible if we could incentivize competition and disincentive consolidation, though. Not just in the auto market, either.
If you found a Volkswagen type thing, then sure. The problem is that it needs to be an utterly massive discovery to move the price of a company that probably has 100 factories.
That is a really amazing look at a part of auto development I've never seen before. I'm wondering if some private equity firm went with it and rolled up 3 or 4 OEMs into a single more cost productive OEM.
Sell directly to manufacturers? Nearly no one (except Tesla) has anything coming in the near future. Why anyone they pay billions to develop the technology in-house if they can just pay Comma.ai to integrate a sub $1000 thingy in their cars.
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