I sure hope so for these startups. But for big automakers, I won't be surprised at all and I believed John Wolconowicz report. I tried to cut and paste the whole article but the Autoblog website won't let me do it, sorry about that. But developing cars from drawing to clay, to prototypes to actual production car and another big chunk of money goes to marketing/introducing it all over the world in all sorts of media.Good point. I wonder if the billion dollar estimate includes a lot of testing that Electra Meccanica and Arcimoto (and Elio) aren't doing. It must. It can't cost in the billions to build a car. Once you add in all the testing, certifications, and such, it may get a little more pricy. My question for the future will be - if my autonomous Tesla hits someone, who is at fault? I wasn't driving! So, will auto manufactures have to factor in life-time insurance for every car manufactured? I mean, VW ended up paying a lot for what it's employees did... Toyota paid a huge amount for "unintended acceleration" AFTER it was proven not at fault. Hopefully, Elio will be far into production before such worries surface.