Ford/Toyota/etc can almost certainly build better cars, but it doesn't have the technology focus, culture, or data to make it as big of a player in some hypothetical multi-trillion self driving car industry.

Not saying Tesla doesn't have some advantages over incumbents in terms of battery supply chain, etc, but those are reasonably solvable problems given enough money and time. But it's hard to catch up to the amount of data/machine learning on that data Tesla has done.