Where did we hear that before? This time, Tesla is not putting any number on its anticipated return to growth in its automotive business
the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $27.224 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.77 per share .
Tesla released its financial results and confirmed that it did miss expectations with earnings of $0.73per share (non-GAAP) and it missed revenue expectations with $25,707 billion during the last quarter.
Rich McGinn was on bubblevision, with buckets of happy talk, a few months before Lucent stock crashed, when real numbers came out. He never went to prison either.
If they decide to do that, they probably can. In Texas, there are no separate licensing restrictions on operating an autonomous vehicle without a driver, and municipalities are pre-empted from imposing any of their own. It’s going to be an acid test for how these things work without a driver physically present and ready to take over in case an intervention is required.
He also mentioned running autonomously in California, and that I think is an LOL. But in Texas? They could probably do it today, if they wanted to risk the consequences…
They certainly can - I don’t believe they did. They have a small section on what they define as “Automated Motor Vehicle,” which you can see at the link below (that’s the first subsection, but you can use the TOC to read the rest). They clarify that the owner of the automated system (which is probably whoever owns the car, not the maker) is considered the operator for purposes of compliance with traffic safety requirements, but it doesn’t look like anything in the statutes modified any liability rules.
So just like with a regular car, if there’s an accident the person could sue both the operator (alleging it was operated negligently) and the manufacturer (alleging some defect in the vehicle caused the accident). Here, those allegations would probably merge - if the vehicle was operated negligently, that would also theoretically be an allegation of a defect in the vehicle itself. If Tesla is the both the owner of the car and the manufacturer of the AV system, all the liability would rest with them.
There’s no guarantee that Tesla - the corporation that has a publicly traded stock - will be either the maker of the AV system or the owner of the company. It’s entirely possible that the actual corporate entity that owns the cars might be some special purpose entity, and for all I know Tesla’s got some corporate structure that vests ownership/manufacture of the AV system in some subsidiary. But at this point, all that probably just collapses down to Tesla anyway.