It's capital intensive to make all of those devices. Tesla's strategy is to rent back devices they sell to consumers. This lowers the necessary capital costs and will enable quick scaling. It's a similar ploy to how Amazon quickly grew its delivery capabilities.

▲

nradov 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Alphabet has $95B of cash and short-term investments on hand. I don't think lack of capital is the obstacle to scaling here.

https://abc.xyz/investor/sec-filings/quarterly-filings/2025/

Tesla still has no autonomous vehicle that customers can actually buy, let alone rent back for taxi service. So any "strategy" remains entirely hypothetical.

	▲	hollerith 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Alphabet has $95B of cash and short-term investments Not only that, but also they could probably raise 10 times that much by creating new shares and selling them (if they had a plausible story to tell investors as to why the money would be well spent).

▲

senordevnyc 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I so wish Tesla had gone Waymo’s route and focused on delivering really safe LIDAR-based level 4 with cheaper hardware. I think they’d be well-positioned to take the market by storm.

But instead they made an ideological stand on cameras only, and they’re helmed by an unhinged drug addict who lies constantly, to the point many who once would have loved to buy an actual self-driving Tesla now won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, even if they do someday deliver an L4 experience.

I really, really hope Waymo licenses their tech. I think that would stomp Tesla into the ground once and for all.

▲

Rover222 2 days ago | parent [-]

it's bizarre how even the smart people here (smarter than me on average, no doubt), think they know better than Karpathy and Musk who have spent a decade deep in this problem.

SpaceX has landed orbital boosters 500 times, and STILL no one else has done it.

Teslas drive millions of miles autonomously (yes supervised, but still) every day.

You can't even type a response without containig your political/social bias on anything related to Musk.

▲

metabagel 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Tesla is still at level 2 autonomy, whereas Waymo is at level 4.

It doesn't appear Tesla can achieve level 3 autonomy given Musk's ideological opposition to lidar. Without lidar, the AI has to be 100% accurate, and it's not and won't be for the foreseeable future.

As they say in Maine, "You can't get there from here."

▲

Rover222 2 days ago | parent [-]

The level 2 vs 4 thing is a technicality and fairly misleading, Teslas can already operate in a much wider range of roads and conditions. Waymo is still on guardrails. Mercedes touted "level 4" but you had to be following another car, going slow, etc etc. General autonomy is what matters.

I trust Karpathy when it comes to lidar vs vision. Do you shoot lasers out of your head to drive?

	▲	nradov 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		LIDAR sensors are getting cheaper faster than camera-based autonomous driving software is improving. I predict that in a few years, regular luxury cars that are still mostly human driven will come with LIDAR for collision avoidance and improved driver situational awareness. Just like they already use RADAR for the same purpose today.

▲

senordevnyc 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Musk might be smarter than me, and he might succeed and beat Waymo. I’m saying that I hope he doesn’t, and I will avoid supporting him or his companies. Not because I’m smarter, but because my values do not align with his, and I do not wish to see someone so reckless and immoral become even more rich and powerful. You’re free to label that as biased if you wish.