I heard about this story when BMW was designing the 1300GS, they had a bag of 40 lbs of sand hanging in the engineers' office. Engineers who developed weight savings got to do a ceremony where they removed that amount of sand from the bag.
This reminds me of the “battery bucks” design philosophy at Tesla, where a part could be as expensive as an engineer wanted if it increased range by at least that much cost in batteries. This was responsible for, among other things, monobloc brake calipers on the model 3 because it retracted the pads faster than a sliding piston caliper.
