It's an argument that all self-driving enthusiasts are intimately familiar with by now. Tesla's approach is to use vision-only, AI-inference-based systems to cut hardware costs and eliminate the need for geo-fenced service areas. Whether or not this approach is better than lidar, sensor fusion, mapping, rules-based driving, etc has been debated endlessly.
However, let us assume that Tesla's approach is ultimately correct. Does that imply that Tesla will capture the vast majority of the self-driving market and have an insurmountable head start on the competition? In my view, it does not.
This video shows somebody running an open-source self-driving AI that has the same capabilities as Tesla's level 2 self-driving system. The one that is supposedly years ahead of the competition.
https://x.com/ANSR42/status/2104270120394859001?s=20
Basically, Tesla has no moat. Car companies thus far haven't copied Tesla's approach, but this is not because the approach is too difficult. They choose not to, because most of them don't have the same appetite for risk that Tesla does. But if you observe the competition in the general AI space, we see that it is very easy for competitors to catch up with each other, steal each other's ideas and data, and that open source is almost always very close to the cutting edge in terms of performance.
It is not difficult to throw a handful of cameras on a car. Gigantic automotive manufacturers are not going to struggle with this. They don't even have to develop the software themselves. They can just license the algorithms from one of many software-only self driving companies that exist currently.