[theoryofx]

The lidars used on self-driving vehicles are far more capable and far more expensive.

[xbmcuser]

Not by that much current generation hardware for cars is $500-700. And some of the oem expect to bring it price down below $200 with the next generation equipment. Now that BYD put self driving in almost every car it will supercharge adoption and lidar prices might drop even a lot faster with economies of scale.

[jpk]

My (tenuous) understanding is that the challenge with lidar isn't necessarily the cost of the sensor(s) but the bandwidth and compute required to meaningfully process the point cloud the sensors produce, at a rate/latency acceptable for driving. So the sensors themselves can be a few hundred bucks but what other parts of the system also need to be more expensive?

[jsiepkes]

At this point having "something" would probably even beat having nothing.

I guess it's simply a big numbers thing. If you sell lots of cars, shaving a couple of hundred dollars of each car adds up.