[Adam Shapiro]

Originally Posted by kE7JLM

Well, Stanford's cost $500,000. It took a year to build. Also the had to identical cars.

Don't forget that Stanford also had considerable help from VW, who both provided vehicles and implemented a full drive-by-wire system for them. A good deal of money is also needed for overhead for the project. It doesn't all go directly into the car. We received $1M from DARPA (as did Stanford) as one of the Track A teams, as well as some additional funding and assistance from other sponsors. A large part of that money did not actually go into the car in the end. I'd say our car cost somewhere around $600,000-$700,000 in the end, but it's hard to tell.

As for the length of time it took to build, most teams (not all though) have been working on the project since the competition was announced last April. There is much work that has to go into the project long before work on the car itself ever begins. We began planning towards the end of last April, and actually purchased our car in January. Actuation and control took about two months to develop (though revisions continued until about July), sensor interfacing took from last August to around June, and AI was under development from before the competition announcement until the day the car left for CA. The total number of man-hours that went into this project is no longer a number we can calculate, but when people say the project took a year and a half of their life they mean it.