Tesla Insurance is a kind of small moat. But I think Tesla is really banking on winning the automotive AI race. They currently don't seem to be winning, but that does appear to be their main gamble. If they can be the first to achieve level 4+ self-driving then they would definitely dominate regardless of charging infrastructure.
Only idiots buy black-box based car insurance (whether Tesla or any other).
I mean, come on, insurance companies are already renowned for slippery policy wordings and the desire to get out of paying-out.
Do you seriously think an insurance company having access to your driving data is really being done for your benefit ?
I would be willing to bet its so that Mr Risk Adjustor at the insurance company can say "computer AI algorithm says it thinks you were driving 'aggressively' that morning".
And once "computer says no" you'll have a hell of a time trying to fight it.
> And once "computer says no" you'll have a hell of a time trying to fight it.
Cars have been equipped with event data recorders that capture information moments before the crash for at least 20 years. It is part of the air bag controller. Insurance companies have equipment to read that data and use it against customers all the time.
You don't need a Tesla or other black box insurance to get cheated.
Having a little accelerometer data that is probably a mild hassle to extract is far different than an always-on, internet-enabled, sensor-filled computer that literally has a camera pointing at your face.
Why would a source of signal that has aligned incentives for all three major parties (individual, manufacturer, and insurance company) not be selected for by the market?
It's not as if people are buying meteor insurance here. Automotive accidents are frequent enough to where if a policy provider fails to cover damage that really is in-policy they'll be sued, regulated, and shamed.
Even more so, since Tesla has a financial incentive to ensure that these benefits really do accrue to the driver.
Monitored policies are almost always significantly cheaper. That's why people buy them. I won't engage on who the "idiot" is in that analysis except to say that Adam Smith probably has an opinion.
The reason this works is that it forces the consumers to self-partition into those who think they drive safely and those who know they don't. That doesn't correlate perfectly with actual safety, but it's clear that it's a good proxy signal. Insurance companies may be renowned for "slippery policy wordings", but they're even better known for doing good statistics.
> Do you seriously think an insurance company having access to your driving data is really being done for your benefit ?
Well yes, there's marginal value for both you and Tesla in excluding aggressive drivers from the program. Some company with worse telemetry eats the cost of the accidents from those drivers.
It's fine to argue that this is a privacy tradeoff you don't think should be legal but there's pretty obviously value to be had for both insurance and customer.
Just like how Samsung beat Apple to face scanning technology.
Mercedes version is extremely limited and is only available on $100k+ cars with tons of additional hardware.
I have Tesla FSD. It is certainly overpriced, but it has genuinely been getting a lot better in the last year. When I first got it I was disappointed because it was so useless, now I use it probably 70%+ of my drives.
IMO Tesla is the closest to a mass-market version of the technology.
Fanboys sometimes talk about a favoured corporation with rose coloured glasses. Hateboys (or whatever you might call an inverse fanboy) often talk in reductive and/or derogatory terms about both corporations and anyone who defends them. Both groups are occasionally a bit sad and naive, but it's usually only the latter which become corrosive and openly hateful.
Unfortunately the bulk of the internet seems incapable of recognising this and all too often gives hateboys a free pass.
Fanboys also annoy me. The other side of the coin is that there are people who worship companies no matter what they do.
I personally prefer more of a “let’s judge each product on its own” sort of person. I love my iPhone and AirPods, but I don’t personally have any desire to own a Mac or the new Vision Pro.
The self-driving car level system is stupid because it is implies linearity but it is absolutely not.
It also implies that higher level == better, which is certainly not a given. Is a system that can drive well on 10% of roads 99% of the time better than a system that can drive on 90% of roads 80% of the time? Not objectively. The former is "level 3" and the latter is "level 2".
A solution that can get you to 3 quickly might never get you to 4. And just because you beat someone else to market with "level 3" doesn't mean their solution won't skip over yours straight to 4/5.
This is a tired argument. Level 3 driving in extremely strict conditions in a very small area using technology and software that doesn't scale isn't "beating" Tesla.
Level 3 is the lowest level of self-driving. Level 2 and below are driver assistance features. Tesla makes very nice driver assistance features, but they have not released any features which operate the vehicle safely by itself under any circumstance.
MB is beating Tesla in the self driving game because they've released a car that is >0% self driving. Tesla is beating everyone at the driver assistance game.
This is semantics. Firstly because this difference is largely because Tesla chooses to not deploy it as level 3 in some tiny highly-mapped market with sensors (LIDAR) and software that don't scale (MB's level 3 breaks at the first change in roads like construction). Secondly because Tesla is 90%+ of the way to building level 3 driving in 99% of places. MB is 99% of the way to level 3 driving in 0.1% of places and it would take them years and billions of dollars to get that to 5%. I'll let you do the math and see which is further ahead.
It's not semantics at all. They're both currently focused on solving very different problems under the broad category of "driving automation". While MBs approach has obvious coverage limitations, the advantage to that approach is that the solution is a more clearly scoped problem with a more obvious answer: expand the coverage. Tesla's approach doesn't have nearly as clear of a path to advancement. They need technology that doesn't yet exist to get there. Some have posed some serious concerns about whether Tesla's feature-first maturity-second approach is an engineering dead end and will ever be able to mature to the point of being able to operate unsupervised. They may be close, but the Pareto principle is a bitch.
Time will tell, but I suspect we'll see Tesla adopt some of the same strategies that other automakers are taking before this race is over.
> clearly scoped problem with a more obvious answer: expand the coverage
That's the problem, though. The scope is always changing. Roads change, barriers get put up, roads are closed, potholes form, detours signs go up. As soon as any of this happens, the extremely accuracy mapping that systems like MB rely on stops working. This has been proven when this sort of tech caused literally a dozen self-driving cars to just randomly stop and block a single intersection a year ago.
> Tesla's approach doesn't have nearly as clear of a path to advancement.
The path is very clear and they're doing it.
> They need technology that doesn't yet exist to get there.
This isn't really the case. Self driving can be done with cameras and sufficiently advanced software alone. The software isn't 100% there yet, which is why they're still requiring human supervision. But the technology is definitely there.
> Some have posed some serious concerns about whether Tesla's feature-first maturity-second approach is an engineering dead end and will ever be able to mature to the point of being able to operate unsupervised
Sure, possibly, but MB's approach is by far the more certain dead-end due to my first point.
> Time will tell, but I suspect we'll see Tesla adopt some of the same strategies that other automakers are taking before this race is over.
I doubt it. The other automakers are using dated methods that have been attempted for decades. Tesla is the first to go balls-out on camera-only automation.
MB's approach will work when cars literally drive on rails.
> currently focused on solving very different problems
MB is focused on highlines and providing little value for a very high price.
MB is simply no a software company I would trust. Company like Waymo have spend billions and billions to get to where they are and their software engineers are a hell of a lot better then those at MB if I know anything about German software engineering.
Tesla has deployed end to end neural networks that can handle a huge amount of situation and is getting better far faster then MB is improving its system. With MB approach it would take decades to get there and that if you assume really good execution.
MB's system accomplishes the levels of quality defined in the SAE standard. Tesla is taking a different strategy by focusing on quantity of features, although many of them fail to meet the reliability standards of the higher SAE specs.
Tesla is stuck at level 2 because the level of reliability required at level 3 would mean they'd have to remove features to meet it.
Tesla generates plenty of headlines every time one decapitates a driver or crashes full speed into large pretty much visible from space police/fire truck blinking all of its lights.
At some point there will be a research breakthrough in ML with models that can extrapolate physics which is the current thing that is missing from self driving being actually good.
At that point Tesla is going to be the winner without a doubt because they have the hardware and data to train en masse and deploy to cars.
As a current Tesla model 3 owner, when I bought it - there was nothing remotely similar on the market. Today, I see the SC network, AutoPilot and general-'fun' factor as the Tesla differentiators.
When I need to buy a new car in a few years (I honestly have no idea what kind of lifespan to expect), I'm looking forward to more options.
