Their 5+ year lead in autonomous driving is, by itself, a really exciting thing to bet on
I”m not exactly how to assess this but probably worth mentioning that Buick, GM and Ford were conducting testing for self driving cars back in the early 1990s. To be sure, they were a lot different and how the entire system would need to come together to be successful is different.
However, it is also not clear, to me at least, that the best next generation small vehicle transportation system will simply be the same network of roads and control systems with “smart” cars. In other words, Tesla may well be a great stepping stone to the next level of transportation but not really where that is going and perhaps not even positioning it well for a better system/infrastructure setting.
Exciting yes but I think history has a pretty good number or first innovators that ended up getting sidelined for various reasons—all I suspect relating to network type effects as they relate to the larger economic nexus in which they need to fit.
I”m not exactly how to assess this but probably worth mentioning that Buick, GM and Ford were conducting testing for self driving cars back in the early 1990s. To be sure, they were a lot different and how the entire system would need to come together to be successful is different.
However, it is also not clear, to me at least, that the best next generation small vehicle transportation system will simply be the same network of roads and control systems with “smart” cars. In other words, Tesla may well be a great stepping stone to the next level of transportation but not really where that is going and perhaps not even positioning it well for a better system/infrastructure setting.
Exciting yes but I think history has a pretty good number or first innovators that ended up getting sidelined for various reasons—all I suspect relating to network type effects as they relate to the larger economic nexus in which they need to fit.