Conflict: Who Is Going to Win the Race to Build Self-Driving Cars?

Wired published this article on March 3, 2017: Detroit Is Stomping Silicon Valley in the Self-Driving Car Race, and the next day, the New York Times published this article: Tesla Passes Ford in Market Value as Investors Bet on the Future. Clearly Wall Street doesn’t agree with Navigant Research, although of course their objectives are different. Navigant placed Ford as the leader in the race, with GM a close second, and Tesla in 12^th place. I’ll make a wild guess that the big car companies funded Navigant’s study J.

Of course Navigant didn’t have access to Tesla’s 1Q2017 results: a record number of vehicles produced, 25,000, for a 69% increase over last year. And they probably don’t believe Elon Musk’s plan to build 500,000 Teslas next year. Bloomberg is skeptical that Tesla can ramp up production that quickly, even though Elon Musk says orders are going out to suppliers for Model S production of 1,000/week starting in July, and ramping to 5,000/week by the end of this year. Bloomberg notes this would mean outselling BMW 3’s and Mercedes C’s combined.

This conflict is really amusing, especially given my previous post!  I can hardly wait to see how this turns out