A strong dogmatic vision that seems to come entirely from a desire for cost reduction rather than a concern for safety or functionality.

The set of parking sensors costs what? 100 USD? On a car that sells for upwards of $30-40k?

That's a pretty ridiculous penny pinching.

Almost every component of your car is the result of absolutely insane cost cutting and overworked suppliers. Car companies are notorious for putting enormous pressure on subcontractors to reduce prices at all costs.

Worth noting there's other savings associated with reducing complexity; operational, supply, QA, etc. But yeah a car that's worth that much I think should certainly have them.

I’d pay extra if they remove FM too. My previous car always blasted the radio when started. The radio is either white noise or people talking or music that isn’t mine… not sure which is worse.

Throwback to a past where you cloud remove the audio player and replace it with one you bought, all for not that expensive.

Modern cars, like all tech, are losing customizability and repairability in favor of slick designs and vendor control. I just hope the car-equivalent of tower PCs never fully go away.

Yes in those days car stereos were frequently stolen. The entertainment system is so integrated these days you'd have to steal the entire car.

$100 here, $100 there, after a while you're talking about real money!

I guess it helps explain why Tesla's margins per car are so huge.

Munro & Associates estimates the cost of the sensor plus installation to be $8 so $96 across the car, and the rest of the cost for the wiring totals to $114[0] all including cost to install them.

From sales alone, ie. 420k a quarter or 1.6 million a year[1], they save $180M in a year and Munro estimates $100k/yr savings in removing them from their inventory.

0: https://youtu.be/LS3Vk0NPFDE?t=276

1: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-...

> That's a pretty ridiculous penny pinching.

Ford is eliminating AM radio from its entire line (except where contractually required), saving, I suppose, less than $10/vehicle. They’d rather deal with the bad press to save a few bucks from their BOM.

This may be marketing lies, but I thought that was due to AM radio not working well on electric vehicles [0].

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/media/am-radio-c...

If you can’t use an AM radio in an electric vehicle your vehicle is violating FCC regulations.

I don't think the FCC cares about interference unless it affects other people.

Look at TVs and computer monitors for example. I've got a Samsung SyncMaster T240 monitor that blasts out annoying noise all across the 2m ham band (and nearby police and fire bands). I've got to turn it off if I want to usefully scan those bands with a radio that is within a meter of the monitor.

Yet it passed FCC certification. Yes, it is noisy, but even if I were in a small apartment it would not be noisy enough to interfere with someone in another apartment. It just is a problem near the monitor.

Not all TVs and monitors are noisy. When playing with an RTL-SDR on my 2017 iMac I've never found any significant noise coming from the iMac for example.

Unfortunately this is something that reviewers don't seem to ever test.

Almost every EV now comes without an AM radio because of the interference. The original tesla model S had an am radio, but now they dropped them. It's apparently not a requirement any more. They must have some some special work to somehow eliminate the interference of the electric drivetrain.

Mercedes and BMW couldn't get away with it because they sell on premium and German engineering.

Well the whole VW cheating disaster was prompted by trying to save a few $ in parts IIRC

Nah, that was much more defensible from a penny pinching standpoint since they would’ve had to reengineer their vehicles for larger DEF tanks, would’ve had to represent lower fleet mileage, etc.

You may have been remembering the GM ignition crisis which was exactly that — engineering team shipped inadequate springs at a potential cost savings of pennies per vehicle that allows the cars to turn off while moving.

On a podcast (Lex Fidman I think), the former head of the AI group seemed to say that Tesla would rather focus all of its resources on vision instead of using some resources on researching, specifying, ordering and calibrating sensors.

Humans have top-notch visual/spatial reasoning systems and we still bang our shins and elbows on stuff. We shouldn't be removing proximity sensors from cars, we should be installing them on people!

To that point, humans have a whole proprioception system (as well as the direct sense of touch) and auditory system to help feed that spatial reasoning system.