Apparently Tesla makes on the order of 10k per car. If they can drop $100 on cost of goods and keep the same sell price, that's a 1% bump in profit/margin. Alone, that's not significant, but it's also not trivial. 1% bumps can quickly add up to "real" growth.

Another way to look at is, is $100 BOM cost reduction would be like finding ~2 hours of man-hours saving in producing a single vehicle. Which at this point in Tesla's lifecycle (they've been building Model 3s for years now), is probably not an easy or cheap task.

Only when you can't ship a $55k car because you don't have any $100 sensors.

If they are, as I assume they are, ultrasonic sensors - schlub punters like us can get them for £3 a pop. I've got some sat in my drawer here (for yet another project that's not gotten very far in over a year now :\ ...).

> $100 sensor

Not even that. The retail price of an ultrasonic bumper sensor is $5. And that includes a display if you buy them in a pack of 8.

If you need a million dollar team to support the sensor, maybe.