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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

I've read plenty of traditional manufacturers working on self-driving cars too. They just don't seem to be as visible as Google/Uber/Tesla etc.

I've been following Audi for some time. [1]

[1] http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/alba...

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That's mostly because they are sensitive to brand damage in ways that Uber and Tesla (not Google) are not.

Mercedes or Volvo getting caught with a product in the ways Tesla has been getting caught would be unacceptable to their customers. The brand damage would be massive. Tesla as 'the new kid on the block' has a lot of leeway to mess up that you would never accept from an established brand. The whole autopilot saga is an excellent example.

By the time Volvo or Mercedes release a next level self driving car you can simply expect it to work, all the time. Until then they will release small incremental steps on their 'driver assist' technology.

I'm sorry but that's just flat out wrong. Just last year Mercedes advertised their blatently inferior (compared to Tesla's AP1 at the time) driving-assist features as literally "Self-driving" and saw NONE of the backlash that Tesla faced with the autopilot accident. And Tesla has never advertised their current or former Autopilot as being "Self-driving".

I think the opposite is happening - that Tesla is under much more scrutiny because they're the new one on the block. Because the established automakers have done some terrible shit, which would absolutely kill Tesla as a company.

I'll gladly find sources and further elaborate, if you're interested.

What their marketing department yells versus what they deliver has a huge gap, what I'm talking about is not the marketing part but the actual tech. I'm not aware of MB or Volvo getting into the kind of crashes that Tesla has been having.

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