"Tesla will never release a truly self driving car" unless they significantly change direction.

It is possible to fool a camera with some specs of dust at close range. They have interior safety camera, and everyone I know put a cover on it all the time.

> Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car?

Never is a long time, but it's possible that Tesla adopts LIDAR before it gets camera-only to work.

There are all kind of historical technological dead-end examples (e.g. planes that flap their wings).

Of course it’s not only possible but virtually a certainty that an approach to doing anything difficult will be refined, modified and improved as lessons are learned.

Does anyone now care how much SpaceX changed their reuse strategy for the falcon 9? Of course not. It only matters that they found a way that works.

You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal?

Ummmm yes. That is the definition of doing something difficult.

>You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal?

There's nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but it's objectively a different story when the company chooses to turn it into an enormous financial liability. That is a massive practical difference, with extremely pertinent example being Tesla vs SpaceX. SpaceX has had enormous success running a hardware rich testing regime, and they're very willing to move fast and break things... but NEVER with customer payloads. Which is how that aphorism was supposed to be applied. You can and often should be extremely aggressive exploring the entire problem space in testing before you move into final build and then production, but once you're dealing with customers then it has to be done very differently.

Tesla absolutely could have experimented to their heart's desire without making any financial promises let alone actually entering into end customer contracts and taking hundreds of millions of dollars in preorder money for a future feature on ass-pulled timelines. But that's not the path they took, and that leaves them in a much uglier position when it comes to reacting to data and changing their approach because they've already locked in hardware to paying customers. That's the exact opposite of what SpaceX or any normal responsible company does.

There are serious concerns about Tesla even being around in a few years.

They have very large legal issues right now. Legal issues that are going to cost them tens of billions, depending on the legal proceedings.

What legal issues?

They also have $41 billion in the bank…