I agree Musk is huge on vertical integration, but seems like they are blowing by all the goals he set.
If you look at the actual timeline of AP2 it is progressing very rapidly - look at dates, releases. AP2 is not stagnating and is 90-95% of where it needs to be to have parity with AP1. The releases are now coming every 2 weeks, massive video uploads are going to Tesla, refining the neural nets for exceptions and corner cases. The progress is just fine. The real "hard part" of FSD is going to be the logic of driving with other cars in complex traffic scenarios - and that has nothing to do with Mobileye. That is a whole different software problem and of course Tesla has been working on that in the background. Mobileye is just object recognition and path planning - which Tesla has now spent a year building as rapidly as possible from scratch and is making rapid progress on. Mobileye may have a big head start in object recognition but it doesn't have any advantage over Tesla in driving logic. In fact, Tesla still holds a possible ace in the 100K+ AP2 cars on the road allowing the FSD software to "shadow drive" and test its decisions in traffic. No other automaker has that capability and Waymo doesn't have nearly the fleet. During the next 12 months the
existing AP2 fleet will drive 1.3 billion miles and the cars sold from now til then will drive possibly a billion more (depending on the speed of the model 3 ramp). Each car is uploading tens of gigabytes of video data to Tesla on a regular basis now. This project started only in May and there's no other fleet in the world that can remotely compete. Hold your horses and see where we are in 12 months.
Provide Time for a Better Long Term Solution
Switching back to Mobileye may solve some of the problems they are having in the short term and take the pressure off...Tesla could work over a longer time period to develop a better in house solution without a gun to the head. Going back to the joint Mobileye and Tesla until one day they could just switch everything over to Tesla.
Not sure if you remember but Tesla has already explicitly stated that they were doing
exactly what you advise - but that Mobileye demanded Tesla stop working on its own solution, demanded Tesla share what it learned with Mobileye, demanded to retroactively change the terms of their deal and more. Then Tesla says Mobileye refused to license any more chips to Tesla. Mobileye denies all this and says it was about "safety concerns" - but Amnon is a hard nose, shrewd businessman. Be your own judge - if Tesla is telling the truth the split wasn't its choice.
... Now they are partnering with Intel already, not sure why they might not go back to it.
If you were Mobileye - why on God's green earth would you work with Tesla at this point? Musk is well known for building his own tech - he isn't a partner, he's a user and a temporary one. What a stupid biz move for Mobileye if Mobileye agreed to sell chips to Tesla again - knowing that Tesla was simply using them to buy time while they build their own tech. Musk's entire life history is of pulling this move over and over again with all kinds of purchased tech.
Intel Has Experienced Lawyers
Mobileye was a relatively small company that would have had a difficult time with any litigation, pretty sure that Intel would not be so scared off by that, they have great lawyers and deep pockets.
This is irrelevant if Tesla's claim is true - that Mobileye's safety concerns were a smokescreen. In any case that's all in the past now and it certainly is not in Mobileye's interest to provide Tesla with vision technology.
They are a conservative company, but they would be somewhat shielded by Tesla on the liability front
and also give them a good opportunity to continue vetting out their technology.
How so? Mobileye has plenty of other suitors - higher volume suitors - to run its vision on public roads. It doesn't need Tesla and Tesla doesn't need it.
...If I was Intel I would rather be partnered with an experienced company like Tesla, that has semi proven technology. Rather than partnering with someone totally untested like a GM etc.
Wha??? What are you talking about? Mobileye doesn't need Tesla - any car is fine.