[gfodor]

The thing the author is missing is that Google can't incrementally improve, since they're not in the car business. Tesla, on the other hand, has the option of either incrementally introducing autonomy to their cars or taking the Google approach of shipping a 1.0 in a big release years down the road. That they've clearly chosen the former is telling.

The author pretends that both companies have a choice and have chosen different strategies, but it's clearly not the case. Unless Google was planning on building a traditional car business first (a fairly ridiculous proposition), or partnering and integrating with the supply chain of a major manufacturer (a stretch, if just to introduce fancy cruise control), they were never going to be able to iterate towards a robocar.