I get it that this is the new line of revolutionary thinking (we saw the same explaining away deficiences of iPhone7iPad back in the day, many of which of course were brought back later), but it completely dismisses two things:
a) what happens in the meanwhile, driver-not-responsible city driving is likely years away
b) what happens for those who wish to drive their own cars
360 camera view, availabe for the driver, is basically a standard feature or standard option in all cars these days except the smallest and cheapest ones. It will be useful for years for case a) and it will be useful indefinitely for case b).
Tesla may well not do a 360 degree view and get away with it, but that doesn't mean it is not a desireable feature or one that will somehow be made redundant. With cars adding more and more cameras and sensors, quite the contrary I'd expect to see more and more surround / sensor views in cars... even autonomous ones...
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate your thoughts and desire for the option. I even have some preferences on technology from previous vehicles I have owned.
With that said, I spent 20 years on a core design team for HP servers. Every 2 years we were completely redesigning and advancing innovation and technologies that did not exist resulting in 1000s of patents while maintaining 1st in market share for 20 yrs straight. In order to lead that kind of innovation, over 3000 engineers were employed specifically to focus on future innovation. The fact is, in order to maintain the market lead, all resources were focused on innovation. What was not a focus was maintaining old technology, or designing backwards because a competitor had a different innovation that could be desired. There is no profit to be made in that, relatively speaking. Put it this was, would you dedicate those 1000s of engineers on future innovation that will open the market to new
revenue , or use them on a competitors innovation even if it would catch some new clients considering no new revenue is possible. It is a simple business decision. Their is little to no profit to designing backwards. The cost to do so would not overcome the benefit.
Right now Tesla has the EV market for their revenue stream. By innovating towards autonomous driving, that opens them up to a whole new revenue stream with folks who prioritize that innovation over EV. So, they would catch both worlds in one package.
Obviously, I am representing the business side of the equation. In an innovation company, there is always a give and take between maintaining, going after competitor, or developing new innovations. New innovations will typically always win because of the potential of revenue vs. the cost to backward design or maintain old innovation.
