When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean fully autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same, the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and that level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.
They might do better with hardware than software ...
The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an explanation for the unintended acceleration.
To be clear, I believe that most cases of unintended acceleration are caused by pedal confusion/floormats. Just because that's true of most accidents, that does not mean it's true of all of them.
Maybe it's because I work in the embedded space, but I've seen code written as indicated and terrible code like that is not reliable. It might work 99.999% of the time, but given 100,000 units, and a problem might occur every couple weeks. There is nothing magical about automotive software.
Sounds a lot like what people were saying about Nokia in 2007. It had near monopoly and was really good at executing pre-iphone smartphones, however they were never as invested in software as Apple or Google were and we all know how this ended.
Your sentiment here is like saying Samsung is great at making phones so they must be great at Mobile OS's. They're fundamentally separate things, and we frequently see that proficiency in one area doesn't necessarily translate to proficiency in another.
No Toyota is fantastic at designing, building, marketing, managing logistics, integrating credit systems etc...for cars.
Selling a Level 5 automated car is as much marketing as it is software. It could work perfectly but if nobody trusts it enough to buy, at a low enough price point, then it won't matter.
Arguing that they will be a leader in self driving cars because they are leader is selling legacy cars very much smacks of the "PC guys aren't going to just walk in" comment regarding smartphones.
There's an old saying that goes something like:
X + computer = computer
So
Teletype + computer = computer
VDU + computer = computer
Phone + computer = computer
Computers and IT driven companies are eating whole industries.
For desktops, Apple's sales barely register.
Servers? Nope.
Laptops? Sure. But Chromebooks have outsold them.
The only realm that Apple dominates is smartphones. They're great. I enjoy my iPhone. It also happens that iPhone sales are enough to be the biggest publicly-traded company in the world.
Anyway, when is the last time software alone got someone from point A to point B? It’s a hell of a lot easier to license software from a provider than it is to outsource the building and shipping of reliable vehicles.