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nynyny7 | 3 years ago

You'd be surprised how much the reduced cable cost matters to an OEM.

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gcbirzan|3 years ago

Yes, I'd be surprised. How much money would reducing the number of pairs in a cable from 4 to 1 save? A few dollars, at most.

brk|3 years ago

Save a few dollars, times 10's of thousands of vehicles in higher production models.

I've posted this before in more detail, but the short version is that when I was working at Ford Motor Co in the late 90's I remember seeing some internal documents championing how they saved ~$200 off a production Taurus (at the time a ~$20,000 vehicle) via a bunch of $10 and $20 individual cost savings. It was a big deal, added up to real dollars.

PinguTS|3 years ago

Dollars? You know that automotive calculate in 1/10 of cents. Every cable needs an appropriate connector. Every wire needs its dedicated pin in the connector. Did you know, that the connector housing is directly molded into the case because its cheaper?

Alone Ford at one point sold over 6.6 million vehicles a year.

andylynch|3 years ago

It's all margin and manfacturers optimise far smaller costs than that; when you're a VW or Toyota making 10MM cars a year it all adds up.

pixl97|3 years ago

And if it was only in one place, yea, maybe not worthwhile. But what happens if you save $5 each on 300 different systems in a production run of a million cars?

aidenn0|3 years ago

Automotive manufacturers will spend 6 figures in NRE costs to save $0.003 in unit costs. If they only redesign every few model years, use the same hardware across several models, and they sell millions of cars per year, the math works out pretty well.

nynyny7|3 years ago

Exactly. A few dollars is an enormous price saving the automotive industry.

connicpu|3 years ago

That only works if the replacement chips for the new interface don't cost even more

naikrovek|3 years ago

any change which can take $0.0001 or more off of the price of a part is pursued.