It’s just… incredibly dumb. Because the problem is not the optics. The problem is making a control system that more or less replicates a “normal” human response pattern, but then got regulated and litigated to hell and back, plus some helpful navigation suggestions based on correlation of user location data to advertising partners in partner-defined geographic and social media and demographic targeting nets, plus the fucking legion of weird edge case bugs that have probably crept in at some point in the process.
At the same time, every once in a while, one should pause and consider how important it is to
But we don't need LIDAR! Humans don't have lidar, and they can drive! All you need to do is replicate millions of years of evolution in a few years and you're done!
Competition caught up with Tesla's lead while Elon was too busy with his many side projects while somehow also micro-managing the company to death (e.g. Cybertruck).
He should have focused on scaling up manufacturing and driving the price per car down. But no, he had to chase the self-driving pipedream, launch a ridiculous pickup truck, and wreck the "genius" person he had built to replace with an alt-right one.
Pretty much this. Elon was never interested in what he SHOULD HAVE BEEN: making an inexpensive electric vehicle that's widely available. Tesla had the tech to do so, but they were being driven to make insane decisions like moving the gearshift to a touchscreen (gee, I love taking my eyes off the road to shift gears), or making "futuristic" doors that actually cannot physically open from the inside (whoops, guess those just can't be recalled since DOT has literally no teeth).