Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription hurdle, and it all made sense.
The technology for such a low end car is impressive. In addition to adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, the display shows the speed limit not by consulting a map but by reading the signs as you drive down the street. They call it RSA, Road Sign Assist. It also uses the camera and radar to alert when there are potential hazards (closing too quicky on the car in front, and lane changing into someone in the blind spot).
All that in a $23K car, built into that base price.
Seems like Toyota is about to make a big Lexus pivot in the next year or two.
But in all seriousness, I'll give props to Honda, Toyota, and Mazda for amazing engineering cultures. In the sense of being extremely good at optimizing trade-offs.
Had a Kia loaner a few years back that to my surprise tried to actively kill me by repeatedly steering into oncoming traffic on a provincial road. I really prefer steering myself to last-second correcting a temperamental computer.
Yep, I agree.
I used to travel to my parent's home 300km away once a month, and changing from a 2010 no-assist car to a Tesla Model 3 with AP (not FSD) back in 2019 was a game changer. I used to drive there on a Friday evening after work, and I basically collapsed into bed when I got there. With AP I was still tired of course, but also still functioning and way more alert. In my experience Tesla's AP UX is very good: chime when engaging, chime when disengaging, you don't need to look at the screen to know the state you're in, and if you touch controls it lets you know (via chime) and deactivates.
One of the most horrible UXes for me has been on a new Hyundai i10 with the basic lane assist (and I know it's very similar on a new VW Golf that my cousin is leasing):
- there's no chimes, you're forced to look at the screen at the center of the dashboard
- said display is 100x400 (or sth similar) 16-color pixel screen in the center of the dashboard
- out of said display, you need to look in the very corner for an icon of 10x10 pixels that can be yellow, green or white (which under low backlight/high contrast conditions can be tough to decipher)
- lane-keep is on by default at every car start, and tends to butt in on twisty roads (very common where I live), so half-way through a turn you'll feel the steering wheel literally lose force-feedback, while you're still applying force, and swearing ensues
- someone thought that constantly reminding people of the speed limits was a good idea, so the car will scream incessantly at you for being 50.1 over 50
- but will happily let you change lanes and re-engage auto-steer automatically (you need to manually enable this) while doing 120km/h on the highway without any hint that it's re-engaging automatically
- the speed warning is yet another setting that you can turn off at runtime, but you can't persist properly
- auto-steer, after is manually engaged, will stay happily engaged even after you leave they highway and are at very low speeds, and will try to correct you when doing roundabouts
I think the Tesla UX is way better there, and I think regulatory bodies should start preventing things like the i10 assist to be sold to customers, because they're actively dangerous. I've literally had minor heart attacks due to the lane-keep butting in on twisty roads - I thought the front tires were slipping for some reason.
There's too many random dumb features. (Hyundai/Kia's coffee break notification?)
If electric cars are actually simpler like all of these experts keep telling us, then in the next 3-5 years, we'll know which models are living up to expectations and which ones are not aging as gracefully.
The other thing to consider is the "old" batteries. If I can buy a used Nissan Leaf and harvest the batteries for a home-storage project after the frame kicks the can due to rust or some other problem, then I'm essentially able to keep those batteries as a form of equity on the vehicle. We also will see new companies popping up to address these home-battery conversion projects with plug and play harnesses to drop in your car batteries after the vehicle is no longer worthy of use on the road.
Sure, batteries will also continue to come down in price across the board, so that calculation also needs to be considered, but we're in this interesting middle zone where a lot of used EV value is being left on the table because the business market hasn't quite kept up with the demand for the next step in the lifecycle of modern EVs.
Toyota offers a 10-year warranty on new cars, which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
You can't update the infotainment, but the engine controls have remained modular because it's simply too hard to convince people to buy truly unrepairable cars. Tesla did it, and once people realized that gently tapping a Model 3 was likely to total it resale values plummeted.
2006 Tacoma's are selling for like $5k less than their original MSRP!
In the past, when traveling, I'd be shocked at just how bare the rental cars were compared to my normal home experience. Fortunately that's no longer the case.
CarPlay was trivial to pair up. Screen resolution was meh, but otherwise it Just Worked(tm).
Adaptive cruise was trivial to turn on and read the indicators for.
Lane keep assist was also overtly obvious - both if it was on, and how to turn it on/off.
The A/C controls were nice easily understood knobs and buttons.
Blindspot detection was standard, worked great.
Overall just a very intuitive vehicle.
800k paid subs in q4/2024, about the same in q1/2025, 900k in q2/2025, 1 million in q3/25, and 1.1 million in q4/2025.
Let's call that 100k growth per quarter in 2025, and currently at 1.1 million subs. They'll have to significantly increase their growth rate. The interesting modeling point is tesla car sales are dropping, down 9% to 1.6 million last year. All their new vehicles are capable of fsd with subscription, but thats only about 1.5 million a year (and likely to keep shrinking).
I think the only way they get good uptake is to make the price cheap, like $1 a month, with 12 free months but you have to give your credit card (ie fees that people don't notice scam like every streaming company). Even if every new buyer gets it, it would take many years at 1.5 million sales a year. Need 8.9 million more subscribers, 8.9/1.5 sales = ~6 years at 100% uptake. There are about 9 million current owners, but I'd guess at least 50% can't run current FSD code - they are on version 4.5 of their hardware (they recently released 4.5 in some new cars, and they have a major upgrade to v5 coming in a year or two).
There's no harm if they don't get to 10 million, because Musk shouldn't have that really large stock payoff as he's killing the company.
Step 1: > discontinu[e] the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control
Step 2: Redefine "Full Self-Driving" to be those things. Charge 50 cents per month subscription or whatever.
Step 3: Get 10 million subscribers.
Step 4: 100 billion dollar payout! (Number pulled out of my butt)
Step 1: SpaceX IPO
Step 2: Trillion dollar payout
Step 3: Nothing matters any more
To credibly harness off-world resources at any scale, there are going to need to be automated refueling depots and many kinds of robotic automation for resource extraction. With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources.
That would also completely remove the lid on how many $ trillions of market cap SpaceX could accrue.
So I find it ironic that Tesla is moving away from cars as product, and still talking up humanoid robots, which as yet are not a product, and as research don't seem to have an edge on anyone.
ALSO: Data centers on the moon make more sense than data centers in orbit. Obviously where latency isn't king, but compute is. Simple cooling sinks, dense (low local latency) expansion, dense (efficient) maintenance, etc.
Watch out universe, here we come!
What could possibly go wrong, mining asteroids? An awful lot, when we start messing with orbital dynamics in the asteroid belt.
But Space X can externalise those risks. It will probably be centuries before disturbed orbits start to threaten Earth... So who cares?
Me.
Asteroid resources would be useful for building in space, but that is getting a step ahead.
Everyone is laboring under this subtle belief that space industry will be just like scifi speculated, but scifi stories always treated space like the ocean, with lots of interplanetary trade and easy travel and no consideration of energy (because it makes for good storytelling) but the actual energy budgeting and consideration of gravity wells is the exact opposite of ocean transport.
Global trade works at all because buoyancy and fluid physics make ocean vessels stupidly efficient at transport.
Moving any matter through space is stupidly inefficient.
The tyranny of the rocket equation constrains everything.
What? You're in a huge vacuum thermos
> Simple cooling sinks, dense
I'll also mention that the moon isn't very cold, except on the dark side. In the moon's day the temperature is 120C and at night -130C. The same side of the moon always faces us and the moon isn't always full. I'll let you figure out the rest.
Also you need to consider that the thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is quite low.
I'm not saying it's not possible but I am saying there's a lot of technical challenges that make naïve approaches not so simple. The reason doing things in space is hard is not just the difficulty of getting things up into space. It's that all the things you take for granted just don't work.
Oversimplification is a footgun. Or more accurately, in this case a foot taser (if you know why you've found one of the major challenges of doing anything on the moon and mars)
Basic physics: The moon is very cold in surface shadows and below the surface. It is an enormous pre-chilled heat sink.
The surface is also the support structure for any scale of radiative cooling with the same heat physics as orbit, but much better for larger and enhanced radiative engineering.
For example, heat pumps can centralize waste heat energy. Higher heat density vastly increases radiative efficiency.
• Permanent shadow: 40-60 ˚K, -230 to 210 ˚C
• In polar shadow: 25-30 ˚K, -250 to -245 ˚C
• Under 1 meter of surface, equatorial: 250 ˚K, -23 ˚C
• Under 1 meter of surface, polar: 200-220 ˚K, -75 to -50 ˚C
Many advantages beyond unlimited heat sink/radiative area: all compute in one place, i.e no size limit, so low inter-center latencies, no orbit safety negotiations or periodic orbit re-lifts required, able to update entire data center in a single trip, easier maintenance and stability in gravity on a surface, solar panels can be distributed over distance limiting total space debris risk, different component lifetimes don't result in wasted components, ...
Only downsides are a higher Earth-Datacenter latency, lunar dust resistant design, and a need to be at a pole for all-month solar power.
Nuclear power, or nuclear + solar, would allow any site.
Note that shade can be created anywhere on the surface via reflective shielding, and power can be used to heat, in order to stabilize temperatures in a desired band. Buried installations can use insulation for even greater temperature control.
Of the moon and orbital, orbit is much closer and will be cheaper to start with.
But a lunar site would scale to much greater mean density and unlimited total capacities. And be much cheaper for reasons I gave, at some threshold scale.
Neither is easy, and it’s not at all clear that either is actually better than down here. Especially with nuclear efforts and funding rising quickly.
In a vacuum, radiative heat loss per time hyper scales with temperature to the 4th power.
In orbit large and complex heat transfer systems are not going to be practical. On a surface, specialized heat pumps can localize heat energy to very high intensity. With critical reliability advantages of stability, vibration control, complete sun shading, weaker size constraints, etc.
That is a tremendous advantage that will overwhelm most other details and tradeoffs, because the two main constraints, and operating costs, are energy production and heat dispersion. The latter imposing a limit on the former.
(You have no knowledge of how effectively I use my time. If you have a valid point, make it, instead of - whatever you are doing. Claiming you know things without sharing your reasoning and aspersive language are for the posers. Just communicate why you think, what you think.)
> In a vacuum, radiative heat loss per time hyper scales with temperature to the 4th power.
This is how I know you don't understand the math. Because you didn't take the time to understand it. Plug in dummy numbers. I'll make it easy, 100^4=1e8.
You didn't think about how T works and the domain we're operating in. T's power isn't a huge factor when we're trying to dump lower levels of heat.
Let's say we're trying to discharge our power draw of 300W at 100C, that's still going to take a 0.5m^2 black body radiator sitting in perfect darkness PER CPU!!! A data center has hundreds of thousands!
You realize how much fucking surface area that is?
And this is before we consider all the other heat generated from the datacenter and the fact that you're dumping heat back to the moon's surface which will radiate it right back at your radiator making it much less efficient. Add the sun and you're fucked.
> You have no knowledge of how effectively I use my time.
You know how I know this stuff? It's because I've put things into space. Yet you were even too arrogant to check NASA's website
Technically true, but not really. "Radiative cooling" is heat loss through thermal radiation and it's really ineffective. We use air cooling / water cooling for a reason.
Satellites and spacecraft are engineered to make sure they can shed enough heat and they use a fraction of the power a datacenter would. All that energy eventually gets turned into heat, and it has to go somewhere.
It's a ridiculous idea that's never going to make even a tiny bit of economic sense.
Yeah the only downsides are those you listed, and about 1000 others.
Anybody that is serious about data centers on the moon should have their brain examined.
While they absolutely do have huge problems at current costs, and I don't trust Musk's estimates for future costs.
It's not implausible that collectively humanity (well, China: it's not like the ESA appears to value cheap launches yet) is going to get launch costs down a lot further, something that makes the question of "how cheap is cheap enough?" worth asking.
Then you can take a look at the existing constellations and their combined power throughput, look at whatever fraction of that power budget is not radiated by RF/laser output for comms, and trivially that's the power budget with minimal redesign for compute.
IMO all of space is still not good enough to be worth caring about: the moon is about twice the difficulty of LEO, and LEO now getting to the point that we're seriously asking about Kessler cascades; but also in space the waste heat is currently only a problem with no currently-useful side-effects, whereas down here on Earth we have possibilities for using the waste heat as an industrial input, e.g. using DCs as the heat source for district heating, or combining with ocean water to become evaporative desalination (which is otherwise pointlessly energy-intensive).
That, and the arguments about space-based power is as yet still marginal given how hostile an environment space itself is to PV. And PV on the moon doesn't even get the advantages (launch cost or ~24h light) of PV in a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth.*
But it's close enough to not be insane to do a real engineering analysis. Even if the answer turns out to still be 10x more expensive than the ground, which is what I'm expecting it to be.
* Side note: for a while I've noticed that China has production and money to afford to build a global power grid on Earth with 1 Ω resistance the long way around. This would allow 24h PV everywhere from deserts on the other side of the world including across seasons. Less material would be required to do this on the Moon because it's smaller, and also you don't really need to go across the equator so it can be much shorter, but also this would need someone to put an aluminium plant onto the moon that has negligible consumables and IIRC we don't have one of those yet.
Still, if moon-base design were up to me, I'd suggest sending up 1000 km of HVDC cable on some early missions and put a ring around one of the poles, with some PV every 60° or so.
This is still not a sensible design for moon-based compute.
Even if you assume launch cost = zero its most expensive and less practical.
And the moon is even worse. Still you can assume launch cost = zero. But energy is one part, to actually reliably land on the moon with your whole infrastructure. Connecting all that infrastucture up with power and everything else.
Your basically doing a gigantic civil engineering project all with only roboitcs, while we can't even do a civil engineering project on earths with only robots.
And if your going moon, nuclear is clearly the better option then solar towers. And if you go nuclear anyway, just do it on earth.
The other stuff… well, I think it's worth the analysis, even when the answer ends up not just "no", but "hell no!".
Analysis is much cheaper than actually going to space, after all.
Look, I'd love to do more things in space, but we'll never be able to do them if we lie our way and aren't realistic at the costs, and benefits. It just creates strawmen that are trivial to tear down. The armchair experts aren't helping, they're hurting.
> Even if the answer turns out to still be 10x more expensive than the ground
Using Musk's optimistic numbers, to put things into LEO, it is >$1k/kg for single reuse, ~$100/kg with ~5 reuses, and <$50/kg with like 50 reuses. That's to LEO. Moon is way more expensive.
> I'd suggest sending up 1000 km of HVDC cable
I'll let you do the math on that one, because that stuff is not light weight... We're talking several kg/m minimum... Then consider payload...
You're being pretty cavalier about all the hard things... You can't just hand wave away these details because these "details" are just a fraction of what makes all of this so difficult.
> I'll let you do the math on that one, because that stuff is not light weight... We're talking several kg/m minimum... Then consider payload...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28%28resistivity+of...
If you're not willing to have 8 starship landings for power infrastructure, why even bother? Even with 8 landings and a magic power system, it would only be on the scale of one of the smaller Antarctic research bases.
(100 Ω is completely arbitrary, FWIW. It's a dry vacuum, so bare metal just lying on the surface could run at 1MV. Above 1.044 MV, you actually need to care about random photo-ionised electrons turning into a cascade of positron-electron pair creation events for at least part of the line, but do also consider that this is the potential at opposite ends of a loop rather than vs. ground).
> You're being pretty cavalier about all the hard things... You can't just hand wave away these details because these "details" are just a fraction of what makes all of this so difficult.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm absolutely not saying "this would be easy" (nothing in space is), I'm saying "this is what my sales pitch would be".
Consider this as what I think is the MVP of being serious about the moon, that anything less than this scale is just rah-rah flag-waving.
As an aside, I prefer the moon to mars as a "first attempt" target for this kind of thing, precisely because I expect all kinds of disasters. Toy example: Accident, hardware failure, or meteorite impact that kills the water supply? Dehydration would kill you in 3 days. Emergency return from the moon (or resupplying the moon from Earth) is fast enough to solve that; but if it happens during all but the most survivable 0.4% of a Mars mission, everyone dies.
> If you're not willing to have 8 starship landings
You used LEO payload... Their GSO payload is 21tons[0] and the moon is a lot further than GEO. If you use the GSO numbers you get about 37 launches. But TLI (Trans Lunar Injection) is probably closer to 15% LEO payload capacity[0], if we estimate off of Atlas V, so let's say about 50.
Not 8, 50. You're off by 5x-10x.
> I think you misunderstood me.
I also think you should take a step back here and think about what you're saying. Look at your number of lander estimates here and how far off you are by a simple naive assumption. I get why you made that assumption and I understand why the error was made, but also these are not the kinds of mistakes people make when they have expertise in the domain. I knew it was more than 8 before even running any numbers, I knew it was more than a few dozen. But I also know people frequently make the claim that getting to LEO is the hardest part and that this warps people's perceptions and makes for bad assumptions. You have passion and I don't want to kill that passion, but if you are this passionate then use that passion to drive you into diving deeper into the topic. Don't be satisfied with shallow knowledge, your passion is greater than that.
So I want to address the full
> If you're not willing to have 8 starship landings for power infrastructure, why even bother?
> I'm absolutely not saying "this would be easy" (nothing in space is), I'm saying "this is what my sales pitch would be".
Because I don't think you're suggesting it would be easy, if you did I would have laughed in your face. But I think you've underestimated how hard it is, even though I think you think it is really hard. There's no limit to how difficult something can get so it becomes easy to underestimate the difficulty. This is just like it is easier to make bad estimates of distance when looking at something very far away, it is easy to think something is 5 miles away when it is 10. This doesn't make one dumb, but rather that we need to more accurately be aware of our level of uncertainty. And in this case, it is pretty high. Why wouldn't it be? There's literally no expectation for it to be unless you're an aerospace engineer working on lunar systems.
[0] https://web.mit.edu/2.70/Reading%20Materials/SpaceX%20%20Sta...
[1] The Wiki says 100k but with in-orbit refueling and there's even a note about needing a better source. So that doesn't really count for our estimates. Saturn V and SLS has a bit better, hence the range in the next line. But also remember Saturn and SLS don't have to do returns... You'll find this helpful: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=49117.0
Yes, absolutely this. I'm not even coming at it from the side of the conversation you're arguing here.
Again, I don't actually believe Musk, and all the stuff I'm saying absolutely should *not* be treated as a complete ready-to-go mission plan; it's nowhere near that detailed, and I know it.
None of this was intended to be a "he can do it!" cheerleader, because I don't believe Musk can even get close, I'm saying "As a less bad alternative to him talking about a million people on mars by 2100…" or perhaps "As a less bad alternative to waxing lyrical about something that would be within spitting distance of fundamental thermodynamic constraints even if we start by assuming we've tiled the entire surface of the Moon with theoretically perfect PV" (which is ball-park what I get for his 1000 TW/year number).
What I suggested was only "what I'd be talking about if I had what he's promising", not what I think Musk can actually deliver. Even where Musk has beaten incumbents, it's by being less bad at price-timeline estimates rather than actually good at them.
Also:
> Look, I don't want to call you dumb, I actually think you're pretty smart.
Thanks, but do feel free to call me an idiot on this. I mean it: it took what I now regard to be an embarrassingly long time before I became skeptical of Musk's claims.
And I am not, and do not claim to be, even a junior level experience in space. Well, except for processing data from earth observation satellites, where I can claim *exactly* junior level experience and no more than that.
> You used LEO payload.
As per your own references, landings, not launches. Yes, this may be over-optimistic, but hopefully I'm saying often enough in this comment that I don't take Musk seriously any more.
I absolutely agree SpaceX have not demonstrated what they need to demonstrate to actually pull off the orbital refuelling plan, but (and as per your [1]) the target payload *if* they could was still 100 tons last I checked… well, assuming Musk doesn't randomly change everything again, which at this point I expect him to do instead of delivering any of this.
I'd like to not be skeptical of Musk, but, well, he's repeatedly demonstrated reason to be skeptical of every claim he makes in every field, and unfortunately SpaceX is merely his least-wrong domain rather than one where he's close to correct.
Still, steel-man and all that. Given what he's saying he plans to do, what would I do with that? Not Mars, not space data centres.
> Because 100 launches is a non-starter.
I don't expect Musk to actually succeed with his prices, but *hypothetically* if he did, the target price per launch is order-of $10M (and if that target price sounds stupid, I'm more inclined to believe anyone on this forum dissenting than Musk's own claims on this), *if* then it would be lower than a Falcon 9's current price to launch. Again, I don't believe him, Cybertruck's launch spec was higher price for worse everything than he initially announced and that was something he should've been able to estimate better.
As someone who cares about the environment, I am not too happy about even the current rate of launches given the apparent lack of any of those Sabatier machines he kept saying would let them do ISRU for return trips from Mars. So I also kinda want him to fail here.
But if, *if* I was taking those numbers seriously, if I was worth a few hundred billion and wanted to demonstrate serious commitment to building up off-Earth infrastructure, *then*.
Sure, an asteroid theoretically has eighty quadrillion dollars of whatever, but you're going to spend ninety bajillion getting anything there and back, plus you'd ...well, crater the market even if you did.
We're not hurting for heat sinks. There's the entire ocean to work with, for one.
Something tells me that Musk isn't the sort of person who'd ever be satisfied. It's easier for me to imagine him like Mr. House from Fallout, trying to control everything over centuries.
For example, NASA has evaluated SpaceX financial status as part of awarding COTS and HLS contracts and determined it reasonable. Also, SpaceX isn’t getting a significant fraction of the costs of Starship development from the HLS contract.
Step 6: Count sales of Transformer toy Optimus Prime units towards "Sell 1 million Optimus robots"
etc.
LKA existed well before Tesla HW1 released. Honda had cars on the road in 2003 with LKA systems. That's 11 years before Tesla HW1 was available.
What? Basic lane keep and adaptive cruise control have been around a lot longer than Tesla.
Mercedes introduced ACC in 1999 (though Mitsubishi had an accelerator-only - could apply or ease off accelerator but not actively brake - in 1995).
Lane keeping was introduced again by Mitsubishi in the early 90s, though it was more 'lane departure warning'. But by 2000 Mercedes was offering it in some trucks and by 2003 Honda had it widely available in the Inspire with active lane keeping.
I'll let you find the video, it's brutal. Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue when overtaking other cars.
Unfortunately, today in Romanian news:
Google translated link:
https://hotnews-ro.translate.goog/cocaina-cannabis-si-alcool...
Original link:
https://hotnews.ro/cocaina-cannabis-si-alcool-in-sangele-sof...
Informative title:
Cocaine, cannabis and alcohol in the blood of the driver of the minibus with Greek supporters involved in the accident in Timiș, prosecutors announce
Lol part:
The hypothesis was rejected by the company that rented the minibus. The company's lawyer stated to the Greek publication naftemporiki.gr that the rented vehicle did not have the lane assist system.
This Daily Mail article¹ has it. It.. doesn't look brutal to me?
Just looks like the minibus driver, who was driving on the median, veered across it into the oncoming lane to crash with the semi.
He wasn't in a lane to begin with.
> Allegedly caused by lane assist activating out of the blue
Yeah dawg, imma need a second opinion on this.
This is alleged by the survivors of the crush.
Which is weird, because the passengers wouldn't know about what happened in the split-second that resulted in the crash.
Particularly, the passengers wouldn't know about whether lane assist interfered.
And the driver, who would, also happened to be drunk and high AF on cannabis, cocaine, and yet-to-be-identified stuff found in the vehicle at the moment of accident⁴.
Methinks, these allegations might be a lil' biased.
* * *
EDIT: the other comment revealed the news that the vehicle did not have a lane assist feature.
Such surprise.
_____
¹ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-15503545/...
² https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-15503545/...
³ https://www.romaniajournal.ro/society-people/law-crime/new-u...
⁴ https://agerpres.ro/english/2026/01/29/toxicology-tests-reve...
> I don't think
Could've stopped there. Ditto for reading.
The Daily Mail really isn't a reputable news source.
You don't have to read the rest of the article.
Wow that is diabolical and such a scam. I didn’t realize he was gaming the incentives this way. Is that what happened with that previous $54 billion package too?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
It's paywalled unfortunately, but [1] is an illustrative Financial Times article discussing car manufacturer behavior in relation to Covid shutdowns and strikes. Many firms found the manufacturing shutdowns to be a boon: the winning strategy to accept it as a cost cut and just raise prices on existing inventory for above average financial performance.
My sense is that Tesla is now just taking that a step further by getting rid of their Fordist aspirations and applying the unarguably successful Apple model to the automotive industry. They don't want to mass produce cars and hope for X% conversion rate to software and services over time: they literally don't want customers who are not able or not going to pay for recurring software services. Software is where free cash flow comes from and free cash flow is where dividends/buybacks come from, which determines the value of an equity. That, of course, is why we get paid well.
I end with the disclaimer that obviously I don't believe the world should be meticulously and exclusively organized for the production of free cash flow, but I do think it's important to understand the logic.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4da6406a-c888-49c1-b07f-daa6b9797...
[Citation needed] Cars had adaptive cruise control and lane keeping well before Tesla showed up.
As for the feature itself, we have a camper van on a 2024 Ram chassis. It’s a work truck at its core, with fancy RV bits added on. And it has ACC/lane keeping. It claims it will even park itself, though I’ve not tried.
So Tesla is now charging for features that your roofer got for free with her work van. Such luxury.
It was 2006 that adaptive cruise control systems that could work in stop and go traffic came out.