> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have.
> didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware
A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.
You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.
They squandered their lead with the CEO's focus elsewhere.
$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)
You're years out of date on that number. I doubt it's been true this decade. Reasonable current estimates are under a few tens of thousand at most.
No, I know how much each honeycomb costs (BOM cost, that is); pretty confident on the radars; and I can guess at the cameras and compute.
Then they're way behind others in the industry, and I'm not sure I believe that given the people I know there.
If you ordered 8M LIDARs, the unit price would quickly plummet. Thankfully, this is already happening thanks to Chinese efforts in that space.
They'd need one more thing, a time machine.
TSLA market cap was about 50B for the first several years of their FSD effort.
I think they'd choose lidar if they started now.
I'm not a fan of Tesla's approach to self driving, but
> If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than [their market cap of] $1.3 trillion.
That is an apples to dishwasher comparison. Money is fungible only when it's the same kind of money on both sides. You can't compare market cap like that. (Even for a company whose market cap is seemingly divorced from reality like Tesla's)
This is probably the most "techbro understanding of finance" moment if there ever was one. Laughable stuff.
If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T