That and Tesla is insanely profitable and not running out of resources any time soon. The opposite actually. I don't really care about any arbitrary timelines h

That and Tesla is insanely profitable and not running out of resources any time soon. The opposite actually. I don't really care about any arbitrary timelines here. Because they don't have any real dead line other than "Elon Time" which is probably is a bit of a blessing in disguise. By putting on pressure to deliver quickly, he actually gets results. And some of those results in other areas have lead to his companies being very profitable and unlocking multiple multi billion dollar markets. As long has he believes self driving can be done and is well funded, he'll continue to pursue this thing. Rapid iterations and quickly adapting to challenges and set backs is a good strategy here. I think there are two misconceptions in this space: 1) People mostly only talk about US companies and self driving cars in the US. China actually has a lot of self driving cars as well. Mostly following strategies similar to Waymo and with some borrowing from Tesla. And China is nowhere near as burdened by trigger happy lawyers slowing everything down. It's an ideal test ground for self driving from a legal point of view. And they are well funded. And they are running circles around most of the US in terms of car manufacturing. In general, the rest of the world will need to be covered by self driving eventually. Forget Phoenix; that's easy and rather boring. Can self driving cars manage in Italy, Spain, or conquer the German autobahn? I'm not pessimistic. But it won't be next year. 2) Painting this as a black and white game. All or nothing. Waymo is leading the way here by focusing on where it can work and gradually expanding their abilities. They are not even trying to make it work everywhere; just where they need it to work to make money. It's expanding it's area of operation and as it does the area it operates in adapts to self driving cars rather than the other way around. And it undeniably moves people from A to B at this point, seemingly without major incidents. The one thing that makes self driving cars hard is having human drivers around. Easy solution: get them out of the equation. This technology is basically going to be safety statistics and cost driven. As it gets better (i.e. safer and cheaper), it gets easier to optimize roads for self driving and the problem as a whole gets easier to deal with. Meanwhile there are big market opportunities in personal transport, freight, containers, etc. where self driving makes a lot of sense. Those are already happening. My prediction is that Tesla will do well where companies like Waymo do well in as well and that they will meet in the middle sooner rather than later. And being positioned as a safety feature, all Tesla needs to keep on doing is failing to cause a lot of fatalities and gradually keep on improving. The rest is just raw numbers. As soon as there are millions of cars driving semi autonomously most of the time failing to cause a lot of trouble, confidence increases and it gets harder to argue there is a problem. Eventually, people will let go of their steering wheels. Insurance companies and cost will incentivize them. Based on the numbers.