Electric Vehicles
Analyst warns of Tesla’s Autopilot machine learning potentially rendering all other cars obsolete

Analyst warns of Tesla’s Autopilot machine learning potentially rendering all other cars obsolete

March 28, 2017

Fred Lambert, Electrek.co

Before introducing the second generation Autopilot hardware, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that once the first truly self-driving car is available, all other vehicles without the technology will have a “negative value”.

Echoing the idea, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said this week that they started warning their clients that if Tesla is successful in enabling fully self-driving capability on its current vehicles equipped with the second generation Autopilot hardware, it could render all other cars obsolete.

Fresh off his note about the Tesla Model 3’s self-driving capability giving ‘superhuman’ safety to drivers and be ’10x safer than current cars’, Adam Jonas went on CNBC yesterday to drive his point.

Jonas has long been promoting the theory that the combination of ride-sharing, electric cars, and self-driving will significantly change the auto industry from being measured on the basis of cars sold to the basis of miles driven.

He thinks that it will particularly advantage the generally more expensive electric vehicles:

“Well, we think the electric cars for private use really are … for human driving pleasure for wealthier individuals. That’s why it’s so important that in the shared model where you’re not driving 10,000 miles a year, but 50,000 or 100,000 miles in a fleet operation, then the economics of electrification you can get that pay back period under three years. That’s the game changer — shared.”

Read more here.