Elon Musk’s Tesla Surprisingly Fails To Lead Autonomous Driving Technology

With less than a day to go before Elon Musk’s Tesla finally unveils their self-driving technology, the latest news revealed that the electric vehicle leader has failed to lead the motoring industry’s autonomous driving segment.

According to Electrek, Tesla trails behind other companies in terms of autonomous driving tech based on a list created by Navigant Research, an independent research firm. The list, or leaderboard as referred by Navigant, based their rankings on specific criteria.

These include vision, go-to-market strategy, partners, production strategy, technology, sales, marketing and distribution, product capability, product quality and reliability, product portfolio and staying power.

Based on their research, the electric vehicle leader trails way behind other groups like General Motors, Waymo (formerly Google’s self-driving car), Daimler-Bosch (who joined forces to create autonomous driving cars), the Volkswagen group and Ford, among others. In fact, Tesla is placed almost way below other companies and just a notch above Voyage auto.

The news is a big blow on Musk’s company, which is about to make an announcement of their self-driving car via an event billed “Autonomy Investor Day.” According to Forbes, Tesla has been significantly tight-lipped when it comes to their Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, something that’s believed to replace the company’s earlier core computers. The announcement is expected not only to showcase vehicles with FSD but also to share the Tesla roadmap on self-driving cars.

During the earlier announcement of the much-awaited Tesla Model Y last month, Tesla’s chief engineer also announced that they will be introducing their FSD cars this year.

Going back to the Navigant report, Tesla’s poor performance in the ranking was due to poor strategy and execution in the segment. Despite the failed ranking, however, Tesla ranked on top of the companies which consumers trust to give them the best self-driving technology.

The list, which was created by Autolist, shows that Tesla remains strong when it comes to consumer perception of autonomous driving cars. The result came out from the question, “which company they trusted the most to bring to market a self-driving vehicle?” Musk’ company ranked significantly high next to the answer, “I don’t trust any company for this.”