There's no way you could make the empeg for $300, even in lots of 1000 without a hard disk - sorry, we've been there & we're not stupid.

The VF display cost us around $35 without support circuitry when buying 1000 pieces at a time (and considerably more than that for smaller support quantities!). We did find a colour LCD suitable for automotive, but this was $100 in quantities of 1000, excluding backlight drive circuitry and it wasn't even active matrix.

The cableset cost $50 alone, although this could have been reduced by going to the far east for production and substituting some cheaper connectors. The metalwork was around $50 too, but again if you were making several thousand you'd get punches made and this would drop hugely - ours were mostly CNC punched.

If you said "I want to bring back the empeg with a colour display and want to sell it for $1000 without a hard disk", that might be a more realistic proposition, but remember the software is the biggest investment - more than the complete hardware run costs.

Making hardware is expensive. Making solid, well-made hardware in small runs (and here "small run" is anything less than 10,000 units in one go) is almost prohibitively expensive. Often, when the manufacturer calls you for the 10th time that week because one of the 400 or so components has gone on long lead time and wants you to check out a possible substitute from another manufacturer, you wonder if it's worth it...

Hugo