The article doesn't say they've never made a profit on any of their cars. If that's what you got from that, you should try reading it again.

Also, if you make 1 billion in profit on something, and then spend 2 billion researching and developing and setting up a factory to build a new product, you end up with a loss of 1 billion. That does not mean your first thing is unprofitable. This is pretty basic stuff.

The vehicles are profitable, they just didn't provide enough profit this quarter to cover their R&D and capital expenditures for growth.

Edit: Sorry, and in case it wasn't clear, their R&D and capital expenditures dwarf the ZEV credits every quarter.

Cameras alone are not sufficient enough for autonomous driving.

I disagree with this assertion, because they’re correct that the only being that can currently drive is relying on vision. Vision alone is sufficient for driving.

But autonomous driving really hasn’t succeeded yet. We still have no idea what is required for autonomous driving or whether we can do it at all, regardless of sensors.

So you’re implying that we can definitely do autonomous driving but can’t do it the way humans do, whereas I say we won’t know the requirements until we find some that succeed, and we may never

Yeah sure. If you want the same bad results as humans deliver, in terms of crash rates, than it's possible. I wouldn't trust it. Also human vision and processing is completely different from computer vision and processing.

Presumably we have the intelligence to set requirements before something can be called self-driving - that’s usually what the fuss is about, whether the marketing is claiming it’s something it’s not.

If they fail with their approach, I’m fine with that, just like I’m fine if Waymo fails with their approach. Of either succeeds, why should I care how? Obviously there’s a problem if it runs over some old lady at a stop sign and drags them down the street but that’s clearly a failure for them

Presumably we have the intelligence to set requirements before something can be called self-driving

We already have that https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

Volkswagens aren't that great but I get your point.

Good thing I didn't use the word great, and I'm talking about the cars they made in the 30s and 40s hence the past tense of "made."

The thing is humans are horrible drivers, costing a huge toll in lives and property every year.

We may already be at the point where we need to deal with the ethics of inadequate self-driving causing too many accidents vs human causing more. We can clearly see the shortcomings of all self driving technology so far, but is it ethical to block
Immature technology if it does overall save lives?

Maybe it’s the trolley problem. Should we take the branch that leads to deaths or the branch that leads to more deaths

It’s a fundamental and inevitable outcome of how these businesses are structured and run. Were the decisions to chase larger more premium vehicles short sighted? absolutely. Was the pursuit of Financialization in car sales to make up for pricing out lower income buyers obviously a bad idea? Without a doubt. Could they have made any other decisions? Not without being replaced by shareholders.

The solution to this problem is not just to “kick the bums out”, these companies need to have their management and ownership restructured in a way that generates incentive structures to maintaining a stable long term market rather than quarterly revenue growth.

Some companies, like Nissan, didn’t pursue the big premium trend and they got burnt as well, largely because the trends of the rest of the market and surplus of used cars is undermining their new sales. To some extent their choice to so heavily pursue sales to fleets like rental companies didn’t help.

The original Beetle (at least the ones I worked on from the 1950s and 60s) didn't have stellar product quality, but it was well-engineered to be maintainable by someone without specialist knowledge or tools. VWAG has definitely gotten worse at quality over the following decades.

Ah, so the actual reason for the loss is that they can't expand capacity without squandering vast amounts of money. That's much better.

A thing would need to officially be a flop to be considered squandered like the Cybertruck is looking like.

They might have a few failures ahead of them yet though, but you can't call a mid flight project squandered.

Edit: e.g part of that loss could be attributed to them finalizing and now starting production at the megapack factory at Shanghai. Short of Elon backlash stopping sales of their commercial batteries, that won't be squandered and will make a billion or two or three in profits this year.