I fail to see at what price stalling in highways or letting CO into the cabin or catching fire becomes acceptable. But, we are going around in circles.
This is a whole different tangent. The cost of developing technology is not included in gross margin (which I presume you may know). The fact that Teslas have high margins doesn't mean they have more development resources than other manufacturers due to the lower volume. I'm not saying that exonerates Tesla from not getting something right. It just means higher margins is also not a justification for expecting more.
Fair enough, but this isn't the point I disagreed with. My point was the failures much worse than disabling AEB happen with other manufacturers and the buying public doesn't react to them in the negative way someone suggested they do.
Maybe this analogy will help:
I need to buy a car seat for my new baby. I go to the store and see an array of car seats from different manufacturers, all of which meet federal safety standards. Some of the moderately priced seats even have a number of advanced safety features (translation AEB, etc).
I also see a really high-end car seat made by a company that is supposedly revolutionizing car seats with innovative design and advanced safety features. It’s more expensive but worth investing more for the level of safety they promote. The manufacturer is also known to have high margins that they are supposedly reinvesting In other projects (translation Model 3).
However, I find that this high-end model with the supposedly greater safety and corresponding higher cost actually has a number of safety issues and is missing features that the much less expensive models have.
I also find that both the high-end, high-safety seat and the less expensive options have had equally serious safety incidents.
So why am I paying more for a “better” car seat that markets “top safety features”?
Maybe the high-end manufacturer should have invested some of those significantly higher margins in ensuring the safety features actually worked instead of investing them elsewhere?
And to close out the point, the relatively less expensive car seat is made by a big manufacturer (translation Ford/GM) that doesn’t have the cool bubble around them. If they were to fail to deliver an advertised safety feature for their mainstream America car seat, they would be subject to far greater criticism than the tech/California darling that is Tesla.