Re:Toyota Investing $500M in Uber in Driverless Car Pact
by smt88 on Monday August 27, 2018 @08:48PM
(#17855776)
Total cost isn't relevant. I'm only considering the IP needed on top of widely-available hardware/software.
There are billions invested into electric cars, too, but every large company has access to that technology (either with acquisition or licensing).
Re:Toyota Investing $500M in Uber in Driverless Car Pact
by nerdwaller on Tuesday August 28, 2018 @12:12AM
(#17856506)
Agreed, the cost of the original iPhone vs existing phones was likely “orders of magnitude more” but took a while to proliferate across the competitive space.
Only if you pretend it didn't take decades of gradual improvement to make the iPhone possible, and ignore the epic manufacturing cost of the components. Basically only if you ignore everything that has / does go into smartphones. It took hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into the underlying iPhone components and their near ancestors, to make the iPhone possible.
What's the total cost of the specific driving automation segment so far? A fraction of all the money plowed just into semiconductor fabrication development and construction over the last ~25 years so we could have smartphones at all. Then move on to the investment into storage, software, glass, communication chips, security, glass, etc.
It'd be equivalent to pretending that we're going to leap from Tesla's hands-free to full automation without anything inbetween. The iPhone didn't materialize out of nowhere.