[freyr]

Tesla's goal seems to be making the best electric car they can possibly make, and it shows in their results. We can never know for sure whether Google would have interfered with that goal or diluted their focus, but that's how acquisition stories often turn out.

Funnily enough, having loads of cash doesn't always result in a better product. The awful products that cash-rich companies have churned out in the past decade are too numerous to mention (including several examples from Google).

Also, it's not obvious that a software company can build a great car, or a car company can build great software. User-facing car software has been uniformly awful. Google's self-driving car prototypes, while cute (in the so-ugly-its-cute way), aren't particularly inspiring as automobiles. This separation of concerns lets both companies focus on their strengths (which can be combined down the road, as long as the self-driving technology becomes licensable). Although I imagine Tesla will still build its own self-driving technology, and Google will build more buggies. But even that's preferable to acquisition, because it allows cross-pollination of ideas from two separate entities.

[Crito]

> "We can never know for sure whether Google would have interfered with that goal or diluted their focus, but that's how acquisition stories often turn out."

There would be a short production run of small cars with cheerful color schemes (not dissimilar from Car2Go styled smartcars) sold as "development" units. Car journalists would have a difficult time getting their hands on them, but google woud ensure that SF tech bloggers would get them. These cars would stand out in public in all of the wrong ways, and soon anyone driving one would be labeled a techie asshole. Future revisions would never materialize.