Those prices should come down, though. Lidar is fairly exotic at the moment, which contributes to those prices. Once more applications are found, I would expe

Those prices should come down, though. Lidar is fairly exotic at the moment, which contributes to those prices. Once more applications are found, I would expect those to drop. One interesting application is for motion detection. Lidar gives a detailed enough image to determine whether an object is a person or not, paving the way for motion detection systems that only trigger when humans move, as opposed to when anything moves. The lifetime of the sensors is also important. If the sensors outlive the car, you can amortize a big part of that $200k by just putting old sensors on a new car. If the sensors are shorter lived than the car, the total cost of the car over its lifetime will be much higher.