Vehicle Contract: Fill & Download for Free

A2ABe very careful about comparing unit costs of vehicles in military contracts. It is tempting to just take the dollar value of the contract, divide by the number of units, and conclude that that is the price.Military equipment is almost never purchased this way. They usually come as a contract with service and support included. The level of support could be as little as “spare parts for a year” through “provision of mechanics and all repairs necessary for the next 25 years”. As a result, two different contracts for the same vehicle can come out with wildly different costs per vehicle. When you start talking different types of vehicle, then you also start looking at economies of scale. For example, a contract may require two simulators for training, be the contract for 30 vehicles or 300, but the two simulators are the same cost, making the 30 vehicle contract more expensive per unit, even if the unit cost is otherwise the same.

Why did the The U.S. Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle from the Moon landing cost $38 000 000 ($38m)The entire Lunar Rover Vehicle contract to Boeing was $38 million, not the individual rovers. The contract was completed in just 17 months.to make whilst its just a battery powered vehicle with less components than a car🤷🏽‍♂️?Counter question: how much does a big car company spend researching and refining a new car model?The annual expenditure by automakers on research & development amounts to $1,700 per car, and that’s with 70 million cars built globally ever year. An individual new car model might have several millions of dollars of R&D behind it; a really new model might involve hundreds of millions of dollars. (Tesla spends about $1.4 billion per year on R&D for a small selection of car models.)So if you only built one Tesla Model S in a year, it might cost several hundred million dollars. You’ve got a lot of R&D to pay off with that one car. Fortunately, Tesla builds several hundred thousand vehicles per year so the R&D costs can be spread out over a lot of vehicles.(Each one of the cars below, arriving fresh from the manufacturer, has about $1,700 of R&D built into their price tag.)On the other hand, there were less than a dozen complete Lunar Roving Vehicles built, including 4 flight worthy models (three were used on Apollo 15, 16, and 17. Apollo 18’s rover was used for spare parts) and about eight test units.So instead of having 70 million vehicles over which to spread the R&D costs for a vehicle that had to work flawlessly on the moon, there were 8 vehicles. The Apollo LRV had some unusual features:The usual car isn’t designed for in 1/6th gravity. The LRV was.The usual car doesn’t work in an environment lacking oxygen. The LRV was.The usual car’s batteries and motors can’t work in a vacuum due to lack of cooling. The LRV was.The usual car doesn’t offer utter fail-safe operation to keep astronauts alive on the moon. The LRV did.The usual car doesn’t include multiple radios meant to stay in touch with Earth from the moon, an Apollo LM, and space suits. The LRV did have such a comm suite.The usual car doesn’t fold into a spaceship’s cargo bay. The LRV did.The usual car isn’t light enough to meet a spaceship’s mass limits. The LRV was.But if Boeing had built several hundred thousand LRVs then the costs per LRV probably would’ve fallen below $20,000 (1960s dollars). Assuming anyone would buy several hundred thousand moon rovers that weren’t designed to work on Earth.(Fords and Teslas don’t fit in a spaceship’s trunk.)(Fords and Teslas also can’t run the Lunar Grand Prix )

“The police” is a pretty broad category. There are over 18,000 police agencies in the United States.Individual agencies may contract with a Ford dealer to supply vehicles for X years. When the contract is up, the agency re-assessed its needs and invites all vendors to bid. The agency might be buying Fords this year and Dodges the next.Ford presently seems to have the lion’s share of vehicle contracts in the U.S., but that can change anytime.