Risk of Tesla camera-only self-driving

[mostlylong]

Answers to questions.

1. No, no strong opinion on lidar, or any particular sensor, only interested in evidence of what works best.
2. No, not shorting or avoiding based on lack of hardware. I have shorted in the past based on declining revenue, declining EV sales, declining net income, astronomical P/E, failure to deliver anything to close to claims. I acknowledge defeat here as stock went up in 2nd half of last year regardless of business performance, but we all know stocks can move a lot in different directions regardless of operational and business fundamentals. No opinion on Tesla and J3016.
3. No opinion on what regulators will approve. I’m more interested in what actually works autonomously.
4. No.
5. Again, no strong opinion on what regulators approve, only on what works and will be actually deployed and meaningfully scales. I made predictions for 2026 here:

@mostlylong

New year, new predictions.

I’d be very surprised if Tesla sells any meaningful quantity and mileage of autonomous vehicles for retail ownership for which Tesla assumes liability for the driving in 2026.

I’d be surprised if Tesla can begin any meaningful autonomous scale for the taxi business in first 6 months of 2026 or meet a modest goal of 3 cities in 3 states by eoy 2026 (and hence demonstrate scale and geographic and regulatory generalization by end of year).

These are very modest goals (see prediction thread for fine print) compared to claims that have been made over and over and continue to be made.

Please feel free to add your 2026 predictions.

@Smorgasbord1

phases:

1. Does anyone here believe in LiDAR so strongly that they invested in now bankrupt Luminar , or Mobileye (down 48% this year alone )?
2. Is anyone here actually shorting or even just avoiding TSLA because of its supposed lack of hardware redundancy? That’s silly, do you really think Tesla isn’t aware of the J3016 requirements and/or hasn’t bee talking with some regulators about what they’d require?

(3)Morever, does anyone here know what the underlying physical architectures of the CyberCab are to such a detailed extent that they know, or even suspect, regulators will fail to certify the vehicles because of this supposed lack of redundancy?

(4) Do you really think Tesla isn’t capable of modifying its vehicles to have enough redundancy? That’s the easy part of all this.

(5)And, back to the thread title, does anyone still think Tesla’s camera-onbly system won’t be good enough to get approvals to run autonomouysly in at least one jurisdiction this year? And if you believe that, why?