The Hated One

Tesla's Path to Become a Dystopian Monopoly

Added 2021-05-21 16:04:54 +0000 UTC

Tesla is on its path to become a global automobile monopoly. Tesla's dominance in data gathering and vertical market expansion might soon turn it into the only option for the majority of people.

Tesla is not trying to sell you a self-driving car. Once all the technology and relevant regulation is ready, Tesla’s main revenue will come from renting self-driving taxis. Once Tesla’s vision is fully realized, owning a car will be reserved to a small minority class of people. And there is no other company closer to reaching that vision than Tesla.

Plenty of mainstream car companies have entered the autonomous and electric vehicle sphere. But none of them has the Tesla advantage. In 2016, about the time when other companies where just starting out with autopilot, Tesla already collected more than 1.3 billion miles of data from all kinds of real world scenarios, diverse roads and global weather conditions with regular people at the wheel. Their next competitor, Google’s Waymo, only covered 2 million miles since 2009, all with employees on board.

The rate at which Tesla gathers more data is also unparalleled. By 2020, Tesla’s mileage with autopilot activated passed 3 billion. Waymo, on the other hand, only collected 20 million miles in autopilot. That’s Tesla leading by more than a factor of 100. Tesla is competing with other car companies but Tesla is not just a car company. It’s also an energy company, a charging company, a software company and most importantly a data company.