With Tesla’s San Francisco (human supervised) ride-hailing rollout, as part of their autonomous driving product roadmap, I think I finally understand Tesla’s innovative product development strategy.
These are the steps:
- Scale-up product manufacturing and sell to mass market consumer.
- Test product on mass market with consumers supervising the AI driving.
- Conduct limited field testing with Tesla employees supervising the AI driving (such as 10ish vehicles in Austin driving 7k miles per month).
- Defend product against legal actions by regulators and consumers.
- Seek regulatory compliance for product.
- Design, build and test prototype to meet minimum functionality and safety standards.
With AI driving Tesla is somewhere around steps 3 to 5, I estimate.
It might work.
