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Car building and self driving systems are two very different technologies, skill sets and cultures. Both parties should do what they are good at as is done in the foundry model. The foundry model is the most productive model out there, basically it's do what you do best and rather than spread resources of all types thin, concentrate them on what you are good at and this rapidly achieves scale that a do everything business model will never achieve. As the world becomes more complex the old all in one model will succumb to large foundry models where everyone does what they do best. Apple and Google seem to have realized this. This may prove Tesla's weak link.
I totally agree. Elon Musk is a genius, but he's still a human, his companies are run by humans, and his employees are human. His biggest weakness is he's trying to do more than any human can be reasonably expected to do, and while he might be capable of much more than almost anyone else out there, he expects the same from all of his employees. It's not realistic to think Elon could succeed at developing electric vehicles, self driving cars, a charging network, scalable battery storage, solar power, and colonizing mars, but he's trying to do all that at the same time.
It is not obvious to me that SV is a good fit for developing self driving systems either. SV has turned into a "get rich quick" wonder as of late. Work on anything car related on the other hand requires sustained and prolonged efforts and dealing with a lot of regulations. Not a good fit for startup culture.
The problem with regulations is that our government is made up of to many lawyers and not enough engineers and the lawyers have the upper hand. This is true throughout government, you have lawyers controlling areas and fields they know little about and can't even comprehend at the levels needed. This is especially true when people trained in law direct a war, military of otherwise, many times with very disastrous consequences of people's lives.
