[fastball]

Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, probably his thinking is more along the lines of:

"I'd like to solve this with vision. Sure, we can ship a $5 part to do it the tried-and-true way, but if we do that then we're probably never gonna solve it with vision, because there will no longer be a pressing need to do so. So I'm gonna force us to not ship our cars with a proper rain sensor in the hope that it will continually push my teams to get this shit done and do the improbable".

[_yb2s]

There’s no doubt to give him the benefit of… even in your version they still decided to ship a basic feature that doesn’t work in a production automobile. Other car manufacturers push teams hard to develop new tech also, but they also test the heck out of them so they’re 100% functional before they would put it into production.

Piech was famous for outlandish demands on engineers at VW, but his demands took the form of the desired test results: the Phaeton had to be capable of being driven all day at 186 mph with an exterior temperature of 122 °F whilst maintaining the interior temperature at 72 °F. And they did it…

[fastball]

I'm not defending the mindset, just pointing out that this is what I would assume is going on in his head.

And like him or not, his companies have delivered a lot of innovation in the past.

[_yb2s]

Fair point- that does seem like a likely explanation, I am just horrified that it would lead to putting broken systems on a mass produced production automobile.

[lucianbr]

That sounds so cool when a billionaire vision-guy says it. Too bad reality is that "pressing need" isn't magic, and sometimes just isn't enough. Like this time.