What I'm surprised by is that cars are chock-full of ornate, unique parts (cupholders are a good example).
I would have imagined that car infotainment controls would be a small fraction of the BOM, so I've been wondering if it's not really a cost thing. Sort of like small phones or 3D TVs from the early 2000's.
If you can save a dollar on a part, and that part goes into millions of cars per year… then it will be on the chopping block. That cost and weight savings are then passed onto other things, better rear camera? More electrical current to charge your phone faster. Quicker HVAC operation? Everything is a compromise and tradeoff.
>If you can save a dollar on a part, and that part goes into millions of cars per year… then it will be on the chopping block.
Mate, they're saving fractions of a cent on a part, let alone a dollar. You're probably getting promoted to CEO if you manage to save a dollar on a part. I've seen them cut 2mm of copper wiring in the ECU for the cost savings. 2mm!
Yeah, I have to agree. People always talk about it that way, but to me it seems clear that removing buttons is just people trying to chase Tesla’s ball. There’s genuine consumer demand for buttons to go away in phones, kitchen appliances, etc., I’m not sure how obvious it was without hindsight that cars wouldn’t go the same way.
Definitely solid enough to be useful. I'm about to print my second set of RF PCB's based on the simulations with it. There are still some quirks where you have to read the manual a couple of times until the right order of commands "clicks". But there are good examples that can be followed and they seem to be expanded all the time.
I recently had to disable their Chrome extension because it made the browser grind to a halt (spammed mojo IPC messages to the main thread according to a profiler). I wasn't the only one affected, going by the recent extension reviews. I wonder if it's related.
Hasn't this been the case for a while? I vaguely remember using the optimal e8 packing to try to get denser product quantization for vector embeddings.
Out of curiosity, how many tokens are people using? I checked my openrouter activity - I used about 550 million tokens in the last month, 320M with Gemini and 240M with Opus. This cost me $600 in the past 30 days. $200 on Gemini, $400 on Opus.
My Claude Code usage stats after ~3 months of heavy use:
Favorite model: Opus 4.6 Total tokens: 42.6m
Sessions: 420 Longest session: 10d 2h 13m
Active days: 53/95 Longest streak: 16 days
Most active day: Feb 9 Current streak: 4 days
~158x more tokens than Moby-Dick
Monthly breakdown via claude-code-monitor (not sure how accurate this is):
Month Total Tokens Cost (USD)
2026-01 96,166,569 $112.66
2026-02 340,158,917 $393.44
2026-03 2,183,154,148 $3,794.51
2026-04 1,832,917,712 $3,412.72
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Total 4,452,397,346 $7,713.34
Have you tried the latest (3.1 pro) Gemini? In my experience, it's notably better for a similar type of problems than Opus 4.6. However, I don't really use OpenAI products to compare.
I actually haven't - I tried Gemini 3.0 Pro in Antigravity and was disappointed enough that I didn't pay much attention to the 3.1 release, it was notably worse than Opus and GPT at the time, and much more prone to "think" in circles or veer off into irrelevant tangents even with fairly precise instruction. I'll give 3.1 a try tomorrow, see what happens.
I would have imagined that car infotainment controls would be a small fraction of the BOM, so I've been wondering if it's not really a cost thing. Sort of like small phones or 3D TVs from the early 2000's.
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