As someone extensively familiar with Parker hydraulics and custom machine building (for industrial automation, not fighting robots...), $2.5m is not that bad.

As someone extensively familiar with Parker hydraulics and custom machine building (for industrial automation, not fighting robots...), $2.5m is not that bad. I spent about 1/3rd of that to build up a shaker table for heavy equipment, with nothing more than a 120HP electric hydraulic power pack and a pair of 120mm Parker hydraulic actuators, mechanical fabrication, civil engineering, associated servovalves, motion controllers, sensors, PLC/PC controls...etc. That was a static installation, not a vehicle, which costs more. If I had to quote a competitor machine with a well-defined spec - this had none, so you're basically paying for a couple revisions of the design - I'd figure on the order of 1200 hours of mechanical engineering/CAD at $80/hr, 1600 hours of electrical engineering/programming at $100/hr, 2000 hours of skilled fabricator/machinist time at $40/hr, plus project management/purchasing/legal and other overhead, which puts you at close to $1M just in labor. It would be challenging to source the industrial lego that powers this thing for less than $1.5M; I expect that they're charging nothing for some of their labor, using cheaper materials (eg. start with used digger tracks instead of buying something off the shelf) to make this come out as low as $2.5M.