A few years ago, before the media discovered Tesla, many thought Google was going to dominate the automotive industry with its self-driving cars, but this company follows a logic that steers it away from generating quick profits.
Google believes it cannot launch its self-driving car until it develops the perfect product. This perfectionist vision denotes a low tolerance for the risk of losing a human life or suffering a fall in the company’s public reputation.
Tesla, on the other hand, adopted an incremental strategy to supply itself with then-lacking resources. Musk’s company added more features to its cars and delivered them through software updates. It is a methodology that increases the speed of developments, making some money in the meantime, but assuming there are certain risks.
While Google undertook a slow and long process to put its cars to collect information in small fleets loaded with extremely expensive technology, Tesla decided to install cheaper equipment in its commercial vehicles, thus benefiting from the information collected by its drivers, on real streets, with obstacles and problems to solve. Remember that by 2016 Google had accumulated 1.5 million miles driven by its cars in the last six years, or more than 2.4 million kilometers, while Tesla between 2014 and 2016 was able to accumulate information from 780 million miles, or more than 1.5 billion kilometers. To date, as we mentioned earlier, Waymo, from Google, has already driven more than 20 million miles[165], or 32 million kilometers, with its autonomous units, while Tesla has collected information from more than 3 billion miles or 5 billion kilometers[166].
By aiming for perfection in terms of safety, Google delayed the production of its vehicle, which could already be saving lives. On the contrary, Tesla’s techno-utilitarian vision, according to Kai-Fu Lee, led them to launch their products on the market without prior perfection, as this way they could accelerate the collection of information and help full autonomy reach the streets sooner.
We established in the first part of this book that more than a million people die annually from traffic accidents. China, with more than 1.3 billion inhabitants, contributes more than 250,000 of those annual deaths. China cannot afford to wait for perfection.
[165] Holt, K. (2021). Waymo’s Autonomous Vehicles Have Clocked 20 Million Miles on Public Roads. Engadget. Viewed on February 15, 2023, at www.engadget.com/waymo-autonomous-vehicles-update-san-francisco-193934150.html.
[166] Lambert, F. (2020). Tesla drops a bunch of new Autopilot data, 3 billion miles and more. Electrek. Viewed on February 15, 2015, at https://electrek.co/2020/04/22/tesla-autopilot-data-3-billion-miles.