Tesla Q2 2019 Letter(ir.tesla.com) |
Tesla Q2 2019 Letter(ir.tesla.com) |
> No other company has the infrastructure to be able to do that.
Because they don't want it. They don't want AP regressions we've already seen happen. They don't want engineers testing code out on real people's lives.
You really think other companies just don't know how to send OTA updates to an ECU or other car components?
I could literally put that together with scraps in my garage, my car's ECU can be flashed over OBD, it'd be trivial to write firmware for a microcontroller to repeat a set of OBD commands downloaded from a webserver.
Obviously an auto manufacturer would do more than that, but there is literally nothing but choice stopping other manufacturers from doing this.
Why is everything Tesla does always suddenly some sort of competitive advantage. Next people will be saying the fact they have cars that spell out "S3XY" is a competitive advantage.
I think you're being a little uncharitable or simply don't understand what Tesla are doing.
When Tesla pushes and runs code in the shadow mode, it is run in parallel to the "production" version of the software. The actual behavior of a car, even with the test code in, still relies on decisions made by the "production" version of the software[1]. The purpose of such testing is to compare decisions made by the updated code vs those made by the old version, and use this info for fine-tuning the next gen algorithms.
Because the difference between could do and did is massive.
What you suggested would take at least a year for them to setup at all, let alone work the bugs and making it useful.
Ask any kid, they probably couldn't say what happened at school all week. But if they do remember something, it would have been something outside of their routine.
Ask any kid, they probably couldn't say what happened at school all week. But if they do remember something, it would have been something outside of their routine.
This is why I find their delivery numbers completely and utterly irrelevant to company value. This is a just a technology company that has produced a great user experience and is now scaling it.
Their main bottleneck is battery production and they're very competitive at it.
If the bottleneck was auto-manufacturing they would have no trouble raising enough investment to just buy out a car company.
If they can't make the car thing work, and their autopilot tech sells for as much as mobileye, shareholders are going to be wiped out in the event of liquidation.
How the cars are selling and what margins they're getting matters a great deal, even if you believe that the long term value comes from autopilot.
Tesla AP is a highly integrated, custom product, that works only with Tesla cars.
Mobileye was (and still is) general automotive supplier, with most of car companies as their clients. Intel didn't buy just tech - it bought all also the integrations and market share.
Keep in mind that Tesla couldn't even raise enough money to buy out themselves, not even at the incredibly discounted price of $420/share.
that seems very juicy?
edit: it seems people put a disclaimer on their ownership of tesla stock on hn about tesla threads. i dont own any.
They generated over $600 million in FCF in Q2. Compare this to only $200 million by Ford over the same period, also announced today: https://s22.q4cdn.com/857684434/files/doc_financials/2019/q2...
Tesla's non-GAAP "Operating cash flow less capital expenditures" is $ 613,929 [edit: in thousands, so $614 million]. Ford's same GAAP amount is $6.5 billion, or 10x Tesla's non-GAAP FCF for the same period (Q2).
Ford's "company adj. free cash flow" is a non-GAAP item that includes other items beyond capital expenditures.
Loss is more than $400M on record sales.
Tesla has a demand problem and is discounting cars in order to maintain the growth story.
There is now $11bn of debt and $4bn of accounts payable on the balance sheet. It's costing not far off $1bn a year to service that debt, plus they are also very reliant on capital markets to roll over this debt every year or so. If there was a significant decline in corporate debt markets and Tesla couldn't roll the debt over, they would be out of cash very quickly (regardless of the losses).
Tesla isn't doing that badly. But now that they have some production volume, they have to be evaluated as a car company, not a startup. Can they make lots of cars at a profit? They got the production quantity up by throwing people, money, and a big tent at the Fremont plant. That ran up the cost per car. Although it's better than their previous state of low production with a full staff. Can they get to a smooth running production plant with labor hours per car comparable to Detroit? (About 30-50 labor hours per car is typical in the industry.)
"Model 3 average selling price was stable at approximately $50,000."
That's nice, but the Model 3 was supposed to be $35,000. Tesla has caught up with their backlog, and you can now buy a Tesla Model 3 off the lot, just like regular car dealers.[1] That's good; they're now like a normal car company. But it also means they've saturated the market at their high price point, which is about where BMW is.
They're also at the point where all their models need a refresh or a replacement. Tesla is slow at new models compared to the competition.
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/289911-what-shortage-tes...
I like that they don't stop moving even if it scares a few investors with heavy capex spending on their next products.
Did you even look at the financials? It doesn't even cover depreciation!
Edit: Downvoters want to explain how $250mm is "heavy capex spending" in the automotive world, particularly in a "high growth" company?
Personally I don’t think it matters or changes the likelihood that they’ll eventually succeed or not succeed.
Edit: >The opportunity cost of owning it has been huge while the rest of the market ripped up
The S&P is up over 50% in five years. TSLA could go up 20% tomorrow (and ignore today's after hours change) and the S&P would still be outperforming TSLA.
Tesla now has new profitability story - Musk's innovations in FSD, will make them a lot of money, and make cars appreciating assets. Experts disagreed, got fired, and FSD continues. Wonder how will that end?
Citation needed?
Tent was temporary, and year later - it's still there
Tesla would be wise to focus on being a car company first and foremost.
I don't understand how such huge volatility could happen assuming that the efficient market hypothesis is real.
A more reasonable brand comparison might be Mercedes-Benz Cars, which made 575,639 vehicles in Q2. It's quite impressive that Tesla have got to about 15% the volume that Merc do, but they're hardly going to take over the world with that kind of growth rate.
IMO they should stop chasing volume sales of lower cost vehicles and concentrate on premium vehicles with higher margins. What's the point of killing themselves trying to lift production numbers to try to make all the analysts who seem to be obsessed with that happy, which doesn't yet seem to be working, if the margins aren't worth bothering? It won't end well.
Mission statement: Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. [1]
Strategy (paraphrasing): Start with low-volume, high margins. Over time introduce high-volume, low-margin. [2]
[1] https://www.tesla.com/about [2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
Also, it seems to me that Tesla should work with one of the big three automakers on manufacturing. Tesla has spent a lot of resources reinventing car manufacturing and yet they can't produce a vehicle that meets their needs. They need to focus on the high tech aspects and leave the mundane manufacturing to experts.
At the very least, Musk should trust his manufacturing experts on how to produce a car rather than try to make every decision by himself. He's a great marketer and should focus on that role and leave the rest to the experts.
Too bad they can't lower the cost of batteries enough. If they did that, they could lower the price of the car to a point where it would be a no brainer to buy one.
Designers didn't have anything to do with this mess.
It's cool that they can collect that data and no doubt will help refine the feature, but otherwise marketing speak. Says nothing about how accurate their algorithm is or how long it may take. There's nothing stopping them from rolling out an algo for anything and running it in "shadow mode".
If it is not turned on, they still send the inputs to autopilot, without controlling the car. I think they can also compare what the driver does against what the autopilot would have done.
They can also ask their "fleet" to match specific conditions, and collect data if they are met.
The autonomy day video showed some interesting images, for example "animals" the fleet had seen.
I think this is the video https://youtu.be/tbgtGQIygZQ
I'm just curious if it does make them way ahead, and if so how much more ahead? Is this driving a car vs horse wagon levels?
There are people much more informed than myself that believe Shadow Mode isn't real, and that Tesla is outright lying about its existence.
In casual talks with friends, this is something I've expected would be the competitive edge Tesla has over Waymo and the others; driving millions of "virtual miles" strikes me as far less useful than having a human baseline to compare to along with data capture from a fleet in all manner of real situations/locations.
In huge black font, then they just show the statistics of how often that happens.
It's an excellent way to prove (or disprove) the effectiveness of new safety-related features.
As for non-safety-related features, my 3-yr-old granddaughter calls my Model S the "fartmobile" because of a recent electronic whoopee-cushion easter egg.
Take a look at the rate of growth in capacity both of their cars and their batteries. I don't know what it is, but with Shanghai Giga coming online this year, Model Y next year, Pickup + Semi thereafter, the growth in capacity and the capital requirements to install it, is not matched by any other car company, possibly in the history of car companies (Musk's posit, to be fact checked).
All that growth is very expensive, but they may be able to fund it from operations. That is 'super impressive'.
In terms of production volumes, they are still small relative to GM, Toyota, VW, I'd still put them in the startup category. But not for much longer.
Actual production at Tesla's battery "gigafactory" is only around 23GWh/yr.[1] That puts them well behind BYD and Contemporary Amperex Technology. About five other companies have battery factories in the 10-100GWh/yr range under construction or operating.
[1] https://electrek.co/2019/04/14/tesla-gigafactory-1-battery-c...
I'm sorry, this part is really misleading. The entry price for a 220 mile model was supposed to be $35k.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/04/the-post-model-3-reveal...
Now a much nicer vehicle than originally announced with 240 miles of range is ~39k and the top end is right around the anticipated 60k.
The base model is $35.5k.
I'm generally critical of Tesla.. but this isnt right in my experience. If the company's volume is growing rapidly, they are going to have higher expenses than a stable low growth competitor. Because as volume approaches the capacity of the equipment and staff, you must throw more people at it, reduce maintenance, buy more equipment, etc. And all of that costs money. Capital assets are being built for their future volume, which is going to be more expensive, since they would be overbuilding for their current volume (which can be a big problem if growth slows). And the growth also creates urgency, which reduces the company's leverage when negotiating prices.
Only once growth is under control can a company then turn its full attention to controlling costs.
They're definitely at the point where their competitors would have released a replacement (Model S) or refresh (Model X). I'm not sure it's clear that Tesla actually needs to do that. Ford and GM don't release new models just because the clock demands it, they release new models when the market demands it. Is the market demanding a replacement to the model S, or did the Model 3 hype cycle alleviate that demand?
While they're growing at this rate, they're still a startup and expected to use their available cash to improve their market share.
I’m sure there is one person that made a decision on that basis but I’ve heard many more not-real customers speculating about this as if they were in the market, but they very clearly wouldn’t buy a Tesla anyway and would’ve found another excuse (hint hint: with so much negative noise and FUD and hatred by big media it’s not hard to find one). The reality is even if Tesla hypothetically goes bankrupt, it’ll most likely cause a change in who owns the equity at large and will likely not materially impact the customer base.
In general, it’s much easier to expand the customer base by solving real problems for people who are eager to buy stuff but can’t (for example, due to real charging problems in urban areas or the car being expensive) than to try to soothe a skeptic. This applies to VCs you pitch too. Spending time changing people’s mind is often futile, and in this case it’s not at all clear that it materially impacts Tesla. They are for the most part production constrained still.
Tesla has already lowered the price of its vehicles 3x this year...
To start with, this article of many articles on the subject. Plus Musk has spoken on the subject too.
Manufacturers have known for decades that over automation is a problem. The dream is to put raw resources at one end and get a finished product at the other without humans touching any of it. The closer you get to total automation the harder it gets to do it. There's a fine line that must be found.
Tesla has not shown that they have found the best manufacturing process so they should get help.
Also, it is almost never the best practice to produce a product 100% in-house. It requires too many resources and it's very hard to do it at the lowest cost especially in low quantities. They aren't producing their product 100% in-house but from what I've seen in the past they've tried to produce as much as possible in house. Like I said there's a fine line that needs to be found.
It’s really a question of when bought/shorted if things are looking good or bad.
They've used this capability to introduce regressions in the safety of autopilot before.
When a stinky old "traditional automaker" wants to update a safety critical component, they spend months developing and testing before slowly rolling out to dealers. They want to change as little as humanly possible to limit their liability if something goes wrong.
Now some of you think this attitude is a bad thing, and that safety critical systems should be something you can update on a whim like you update your web server and keep iterating on.
But knowing developers like I know developers, being one myself, slow-as-molasses processes for safety critical code is a feature, not a bug for me.
But previously you said delivery numbers don't matter because autopilot is valuable. That's what I was responding to and could not be more wrong.
So what? It ended easier and cheaper to design, set up and operate than a traditional building (the GA in the tent is already far more efficient that the other ones). It can last for decades, too.
Someone who appreciates physical buttons in a BMW likely falls closer to that side of the camp than a stereotypical Prius driver.
I personally would consider myself a driving enthusiast but would have no issue with driving a Prius as a commuter. Quiet, reliable, efficient.. and then I can feel less guilty if I want to have an inefficient "fun car" for the odd sunny weekend.
Still doesn't make any sense. The S&P is up over 50% over five years. Outperforming TSLA by almost 3x (including the after-market change it is 5x).
I can't speak to how GF3 capex is being accounted for, but competition was fierce to provide financing to Tesla [1]. China pulled out all of the stops not just for permitting and financing, but also construction (GF3 is already having Model 3 production line equipment installed, after breaking ground in January [2]). In less than a year, it will go from vacant land to producing Model 3s.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-gigafactory-3-funding-chines...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI6nJOic4BM (June 22 2019) Tesla Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai China Update
When will you realize that this company makes things up at every turn? They are cutting capex, again. They are slashing prices on cars with "unlimited demand". Let's see in a year how it's going,and what excuse you and they will have.
Come back in a year we shall.
You then depreciate the asset over the expected life of the asset. So if you depreciate it over 30 years, then in year 1 you would record a depreciation expense of 3.33%. (That's for straight line depreciation.. there are accelerated schedules.)
In other words.. It's spread out over the expected life of the asset.
Also the depreciation usually wouldn't start until the asset has been put into production.
>Being able to test your code out in the real world and dark launch a feature gives Tesla a ridiculous advantage.
Is the comment I'm responding to.
You're intentionally dragging the rest of it into the conversation to make my point seem absurd.
Par for the course for Tesla defenders.
> Is the comment I'm responding to.
And that dark launching includes sending the latest neural net builds to the fleet to safely shadow test the changes, collecting millions of hours of real-world telemetry and rapidly iterating without end users even needing to pick their nose. You either intentionally or through ignorance reduced OP's statement to being an OTA ECU update that you "could literally put that together with scraps in my garage".
But feel free to keep shifting the goal posts.
I said no OEM wants their engineers to have a capability and you're fixating on the uses of the capability.
My comment is saying it doesn't matter if they wanted to use it for something as trivial as ECU updates, They. Do. Not. Want. It.
If you want a case study in why, AP regressions are a fine one.
They don't want the liability when an updates goes wrong and kills people. They do not see people's lives as prod vs dev. They do not want to hotfix safety critical systems. They want to get it right the first time, and that's why they're conservative and by god, they get it right a lot more than they get it wrong.
Because no matter how much spin TSLA fanboys put on these things, they are liabilities as much as, if not more, than they are strengths, especially combined with the flippant approach to valuing human life the company that called Adaptive Cruise Control + Lane Centering "Autopilot"
Other manufacturers do have to account for legacy systems, you don't need to be in the industry to understand the relationships manufacturers have with companies like Bosch and know they're not in full control of their destiny.
But their advantage is not a "let's ignore dumpster fire financials quarter of quarter to earn them a multi billion dollar market cap" big.
Tesla is not worth 42B dollars because manufacturers can't figure out OTA updates, and the fact other manufacturers don't have OTA updates should be a rounding error when you list advantages that warrant that market cap. It doesn't take any insider knowledge to know that, just common sense, and for far too long people have been ignoring that in preference for TSLA hype.
I got out last year during the 420 nonsense so honestly I don't know why I'm even bothering with all this, the fact anyone needs more than that to see TSLA is not worth your time is interesting. Anything from that point onward was just icing on the bear cake for me.
Plus lack of legacy self competition, no one else wants to cannibalise their other sales, and no one else has really invested in batteries. Most other car companies can't make enough EV cars to fulfill demand. They're all out of stock until next year because they make so few of them.
We've seen regressions in AP behavior.
Situations where a route that was safe yesterday will send your Tesla into a concrete barrier if you don't catch it
Simply. 100%. Unacceptable.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I do not want to be on the road with these people. I did not sign away my life to be someone's SDC test environment after all.
In fact, Tesla's legacy systems are actually a disadvantage perspective, since they have to account for a much larger range of hardware configurations than do legacy automakers.
Volume, change stations, change tracks, voice command (siri), adaptive cruise control (including mph selection) and auto-steering are available on my steering wheel in my BMW. In the middle of the car, climate zone and drive modes are available as physical buttons and knobs.
For the Model 3 specifically, the price cuts are mostly in-line with tax credit phaseout and they have reshuffled features (AP features moved to more expensive FSD option for instance). of course the higher end vehicles faced more price cuts, but that speaks little of the demand of the base vehicle.
Tesla is not the only car manufacturer. There are plenty of transportation options to choose from. It has a niche now but it needs to sell large quantities to survive long term.
Not good, and they fixed it again.
They should probably put a warning like: Warning: Autosteer is intended for use only on highways and limited-access roads with a fully attentive driver. When using Autosteer, hold the steering wheel and be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic. Do not use Autosteer on city streets, in construction zones, or in areas where bicyclists or pedestrians may be present. Never depend on Autosteer to determine an appropriate driving path. Always be prepared to take immediate action. Failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death.
Then there's "entertain people while charging" stuff.
And then there's autopilot stuff. NoA, Stop light detection, emergency lane departure avoidance, automatic lane changing, conditional speed limits (eg slower in winter)
It has already increased to 28 GWh per the latest earning call, and it is still growing. Panasonic said they already installed the equipment for 35 GWh of production and will invest further as soon as they're able to reach that rate.
And even if they don't use the data to train, they can use it as an argument for how much better they are than humans. That's one hurdle that Waymo could have trouble with, whereas Tesla could point to tens of millions of miles where their sensors would have avoided crashes that humans failed to avoid.
What I'm saying is that you've completely missed the OP's point: The advantage Tesla has in the autopilot space is that they are able to have hundreds of thousands of real-world test units for their autopilot systems by running the neural net in parallel with the driver inputs (i.e. shadow mode) versus companies that at best have a few hundred test units thus limited material to improve/iterate on their deep learning models.
A metaphor for the situation is Apple playing catchup in the AI and voice recognition space to Google because Google had years of material and huge sums of it to build their deep learning models while Apple had comparatively little. The underlying technologies used by either company might be very similar, but you can't throw hardware at the problem to play catch up -- you need that real-world input/learning material for the deep-learning model to be robust.
My point is the way that Tesla has gained this, using consumer vehicles as testbeds, not just for collection, but for actual running code in charge of managing peoples lives is utter nonsense and traditional automakers are choosing to stay away from it.
I mean, this isn't even a hypothetical, we've literally seen it happen, AP regressions where a lane transition your car was taking fine one day suddenly sends your car aimed at a concrete barrier!
You can call them slow, or whatever you want, but thank god the real auto manufacturers are not so flippant about the value of human life.
I'll stick with my experience trying to operate both. ANd I'll stick with cars that have real controls. Not that there were much reliable data yet, what with Tesla being pretty much the only ones who made something like that. Their crash statistics aren't all that impressive, BTW, but it is hard to discern which ones are pure accidents, and which ones are tied to controls, or AutoPilot, or general stupidity.
It will be interesting to see crash statistics of e-Tron vs. regular Q series, though, that would give some apples to apples comparison options.But then that assumes that Audi can actually sell a meaningful number of them...
I don't know the extent of public statements about it, but comparing collected data like the stuff detailed there to driver behavior is certainly feasible and almost certainly being done. It's also likely true that the marketing department had their way with the announcement and made it sound more like an on-vehicle entity, but.. meh.
I just don't see how you got from that (again, really great) analysis to such an outraged conclusion.
> We'll start with the bitter truth. The "shadow driver that just sits there in the computer comparing notes and sending discrepancies and interesting events to Tesla" is a myth. I used to think people just misunderstood Elon, but now I believe Tesla lies about it on purpose
I really did not mean for my comment to be inflammatory (hence the disclaimer and including a source), but considering how quickly it was downvoted I guess people do not approve.
It is an obvious thing to do and the ‘shadowing’ aspect would not be particularly challenging tech, why the disbelief?
And made less revenue than last quarter. Brilliant.
Is the 1 billion dollars lost this year after saying profits forever fake? The lawsuits from whistleblowers? Months long waits for parts? The miniscule growth after slashing prices greatly? The securities violations? Tesla Solar selling the least it ever has?
I could care less about some factory shell in China. They told you they'd build 10k a week in Fremont, didn't they? You have rose coloured glasses.
They made $5.3B this quarter and $3.7B last quarter.
Where are you getting your numbers from?
Anyway, like the financials matter here. It's all about the next promise.
Images of equipment installed GF3 in China.
edit: probably AWS [1]
[1] https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3027077/hackers-hi...
Custom built clusters can be much cheaper than the cloud anyway.
For storage, they say they actually pull data on demand from the fleet. They have NNs that can detect similar-looking stuff to input samples, so if they want more videos of construction sites they just ask the fleet to send them more videos of construction sites. Actual storage of all video isn't required except for their test suites.
I consider it a very interesting thread where someone went looking for proof of shadow mode and couldn't find it. Maybe his conclusion is a little extreme, and I guess people thought I was trying to derail a Tesla thread with FUD when really I was trying to share an interesting piece and someone else's better-informed opinion (which is why I worded it the way I did). I sort of consider it similar to saying "expert A believes that..." but I guess I communicated that poorly.
For what it's worth, I'm glad people are actually looking at the source and critiquing it.
This seems to be assuming that it's something that exists entirely within the car, whereas the more sensible implementation is that the car uploads the sensor data and driver choices to a server in a datacenter somewhere and "shadow mode" happens there by running the autopilot code against the data.
That way you can continue to use the data even with newer or experimental versions of the autopilot code that didn't exist when some of the data was collected, compare different versions to see which ones do better and when, etc.
It's obviously got some benefits, and I think most people in ML would agree that real world data from the "average person" (as in "not a Dev or paid to do this") is worlds better than simulations.
Still, "ahead" and "behind" isn't really a thing before you reach the finish line here. Many think Tesla will never reach full self driving or won't reach it without additional sensors, others think it's possible but decades or more away, still others think it's right around the corner and can be done with what is on a Tesla right now.
Until someone reaches that finish line, we won't have anything to compare it to, so we don't have any idea how close or far anyone really is.
The last minute of video before each crash would probably be more useful. Training on dashcam data of people doing stupid stuff from Youtube might be useful. You don't need steering, braking, and accel data; you can run a 3D SLAM algorithm to extract the path and get that.
Not only that, but by using cheap hardware that consumers can reasonably afford, they really only need to get to level 3 (eyes off so you can work/entertain but driver still in the seat) for it to be massively beneficial for everyone who commutes to work.
Waymo pretty much requires level 4 as it's too expensive to be sold as a consumer car and nobody will be in a taxi when it is driving between customers.
In truth there are only 3 self driving products that I know of available today. Tesla's Autopilot, GM's Supercruise (only on CT6), and commma.ai's openpilot.
Of those Autopilot is easily the best.
I never know why a source would matter in these cases as the writers of these sources usually have no idea and the answer isn't clear anyways. But if you want you can use me as a source because I'm an engineer who worked in automotive and has driven all 3 of aforementiond products. I also am not sure Waymo will ever release a feasible product other than their LIDAR.
Also, the Y addresses some of the tradeoffs made for efficiency on the Model 3: the missing hatch and the low second row. The Model Y will have a proper hatch, more cargo space, more vertical space in row 2 and optionally even a 3rd row of seats, increasing the attractivity for families with many children.
Putting that together, there is a lot of reason to assume the demand for the Model Y might eclipse the one for the Model 3.
Model 3 prices dropped yet again less than a week ago.
>During the quarter, a majority of orders continued to be for a long-range battery option and the Model 3 average selling price (ASP) was stable at approximately $50,000. At the same time, manufacturing costs continued to decline.
In 2018 the Model 3 ASP was above $57K.
Yup. Carmack illustrated this very well in his interviews when he would not talk about unreleased games vs. Doom/Quake/whatever. He always said: "It's really easy to be the best graphics engine when it isn't available to the public."
I suppose I used the wrong word. Any expert or well-informed opinion is what I was after.
They are also completely different approaches, i.e. Waymo using LIDAR and Tesla relying on cameras as the primary sensor.
But the major question is can LIDAR _ever_ be financially feasible, and if so can it become feasible faster than camera gets good enough at vision. Right now the sensors on the Waymo van probably cost more than the van itself.
That's either a very expensive purchase for the consumer or a very large amount of cap-ex Waymo would have to put up for a fleet of self-driving taxis.
And if it turns out cameras were the right choice, or visa versa, that means the opposite company would have spent a LOT of their R&D funding on the wrong tech, and would be way behind.
Even discounting aesthetics, Tesla couldn't have bolted it on to every car sold in the hope that it'll work in a few years time. They'd be bankrupt by now. They were forced to use cameras if they wanted any intermediate progress.
I get that there's a lot of misinformation about Tesla and you're trying to correct it. Even as a Tesla bear I acknowledge that.
But don't do it by creating further misinformation about competitors. You're just adding to the noise.
These are not levels where it makes sense to question if it will "ever" be financially viable. It's less than the premium people paid gladly for a Model S.
A true level 3 on consumer cars would sell like hotcakes.
