[Robotbeat]

Nah, I think the other EV manufacturers ARE years behind Tesla. They shouldn't be, either. The Leaf could be charging at >100kW with 250 mile range and selling like hot cakes, too, but they marketed it as a long range golf cart and were way too incremental and conservative with the battery (although they did seem to address their early problems that stemmed from not properly cooling the battery like Tesla & GM do). And they never built out their charging network like Tesla has.

For self-driving, though, Waymo seems to have the edge right now for near-full-autonomy. Tesla's system is really much more like a really-fancy adaptive cruise control right now. But if Tesla gave them LIDARs (currently expensive, but may become cheap enough for Tesla to just add-on) and made them drive like grandmas (like Waymo) around well-mapped, dry locations, then they likely would be in the same ballpark. Which isn't to demean Waymo's impressive efforts at all.