Tesla could buy land, develop it with roads, and build a fleet for testing. They can get to multiple 9's of reliability before the need for public testing, over the course of a few years and tens of thousands of testing hours. Obviously, that would have a worse effect on the bottom line versus charging customers $10-15k for the "privilege" of being beta testers.
Or they could test it like Waymo is. I don’t ever see complaints about them on HN and it’s my understanding (but to lazy to verify right now) that they have one of the strongest track records on safety. Then again it shouldn’t take much to beat the safety of releasing it while lying about its capabilities and turning it loose on an unsuspecting public.
