Possible victory scenario for Tesla

[dmckinstry]

Tesla has already won.

The fat lady still hasn't sung. But if Tesla doesn't win we're all screwed anyway. But my generation may all be dead by then.

 

[CarlK]

This is another example of how Tesla is far ahead of the competition. They have been making EVs for 16 years. Others are just starting to get a clue and are at least 5-10 years behind. Some are in denial thinking that they can just keep making ICE cars forever.
This race doesn't have a finish line but you just have to look at how far ahead Tesla is to see that it will be extremely difficult for anyone to catch them.

This is also a great example of how Elon's first principle of engineering design is working. He thought it through years ago this is the (only) way that could work. That's why Tesla put cameras in every car whether you purchased the AP or not. That enables it to deploy hundreds of thousands "eyes and brains" on the road today to do the machine learning task. On the other hand others could only do it by analogy and follow the Google/Waymo's approach. I believe all of them will eventually realize this is not enough for them to get there. It will be interesting to see if any of them will be abandoning LIDAR and follow Tesla's approach. Or just wait for years, if ever, for LIDAR to become cheap and compact enough to put in cars. All the work they had done with LIDAR will not be worth much if they switch to the camera approach. It will still take them years to reach what Tesla is at today. Tesla, even it's behind the promised schedule, is still many years ahead of the rest in general autonomous driving technology.

Google started the self driving development as a moonshot project. They did it just to see what that could lead to without any specific application as the goal. A lot of things, including camera and AI technologies, were not as advanced a decade ago too. Everyone else could only follow because everyone could only do things by analogy. Elon was the only one who wants to first see, in his words, the "clear path to get there" and then go after engineering challenges. That's pretty much how he did everything in the past.

 

[mspohr]

The fat lady still hasn't sung. But if Tesla doesn't win we're all screwed anyway. But my generation may all be dead by then.

I think the fat ladies (shorts) are starting to sing. The chorus will grow louder.