If BYD and China are dominant in the EV (hardware) war, then the long term strategic play is to dominate the FSD (software) war. Whether or not this is a bold strategy or massive mistake is yet to be determined.
The only deployed fully autonomous passenger vehicles are robotaxis with lots of sensors operating is carefully managed service areas. There is no "FSD war."
This is actually reinforcement to my point. Getting real wold momentum on FSD software is exactly what Elon wants. He wants to be ahead in this technology curve before anyone else attempts to scale it outside of taxis.
What he "wants" is the hype to continue to prop up a pumped share price that looks increasingly vulnerable, nevermind his own experts saying it is financially incoherent.
they already hobbled themselves by limiting their fsd to computer vision, no chance of dominating the fsd market when the competitors are already level with or superior.
I agree that a purely visual approach is weaker, however the new vehicles are expected to have many more cameras and using structured lighting to identify objects in near realtime. I won't count it out as that is an order of magnitude cheaper to scale if it becomes approved.
BYD already have a FSD competitor. It's not that clear that Tesla will win that one.
Here's some funky footage of a driverless thing mucking around on a race track https://youtu.be/J_c2gsxImjA?t=53 . Not sure how genuine it is but they are definitely developing stuff. Also re their B system:
>It has been tested on real roads for more than a year and has driven across China with no human intervention in testing using a BYD Denza sedan.
Compare to Musk:
>One of the more wild claims Elon Musk has made — regarding Tesla, that is — was back in 2016 when he said a self-driving Tesla would be able to go from Los Angeles to New York City “in ~2 years” (in early 2018)
