Not everyone has billions of dollars lying around. SpaceX couldn’t have beaten ULA if that was the case.
The truth is no one has the physical AI algorithm yet. Having cars equipped with cameras, big GPUs connected to can bus is the easy part.
Tesla has some advantage since they are spending the most on automation compared to other car makers.
However compared to Waymo, Tesla is quite behind. Waymo has done a million rider-only rides.
Tesla isn’t even certified to do driverless rides. The driver has to be at the wheel and all accidents are the driver’s fault.
Tesla also doesn’t take safety as seriously as Waymo. So Elon may be a net negative to the org.
If the competent Tesla engineers got similar car hardware to Waymo, perhaps they could have been competitive. LiDAR solves a whole bunch of vision problems and gives extra high quality signal for processing.
>Not everyone has billions of dollars lying around. SpaceX couldn’t have beaten ULA if that was the case.
But SpaceX didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon 9 and Dragon. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Elon Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars. ULA's pockets were and are gigantic, too.
In any case, infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
Compute power is just money, that is about the thinnest advantage you can have.