[sorenjan]

Tesla's big bet on autonomous driving is very strange to me. They already have a unique selling point with fully electric cars with good performance and design, why are they overextending themselves to try to be first to market with such an advanced and difficult feature? They're a small company with little money, focus on the fundamentals of selling cars first.

It's like the falcon doors on the X, unnecessary, expensive, and caused delays when regular doors would have been just fine. But no, Tesla had to be different, for what? Elon's ego wanted cool doors?

[Traster]

The problem is that to get where they are they've needed huge investment and issued huge amounts of debt. They are only able to do that because of the huge valuation justified by self-driving technology. If they end up as a company churning out great electric vehicles that is not going to justify being valued at 50% more than Ford.

What costs Tesla money is building great big battery factories and car factories, meanwhile the the software engineers working on self-driving are a relative drop in the bucket but justify probably 80% of the market cap.

[mikeash]

Their market cap was already over $30 billion in August 2014, before the first version of Autopilot was announced.

[antiterra]

It may not be enough to validate the choice, but the falcon doors make the X a minivan without the stigma of a minivan.

[jdhn]

I'd say that the X is more of a crossover than a minivan. A true minivan would be the FCA Town & Country, Toyota Sienna, or Honda Odyssey.

[mikeash]

Other SUVs accomplish that with regular doors.