or designed to allow retrofit.
As a buyer this would be nice. As an investor I know that this is a bad idea... retrofits are rarely a profitable angle. Better to just sell someone on a new car entirely. Yes it is nice to have goodwill toward a customer, but retrofits into infinity is not going to make them money and people will be willing to just suck it up and buy a new car (I did... couldn't help myself... and it was rather painful to eat the loss on selling the old).
AP 2.0 currently looks to at a minimum require 8 cameras, 2 radars (maybe more?), ultrasonics, and whatever hardware "under the hood" to process all that data. This means, new headliners, new windshields, wiring harnesses, possibly rear windshield?/Rear bumper?, Wherever they stick the side cameras has to change (holes in the side of the car?). If retrofitting to AP1.0 was impossible, retrofitting to AP2.0 is going to be even more impossible. And lets just assume for a moment that this is what they put in the cars today, are you really going to try to sell the cars on the "promise" that in 2 years you can get full autonomy but the sensors do nothing today?
AP 1.0 was originally to be released in a "few months" from the show time of it... this became 1 year. It would be a waste of GMs to put all that in the car when it is at least 2 years from actually happening. 2 years is a long time for Mobileye to potentially release another new chip, or to discover that instead of 8 cameras you need 10, or 12, or whatever... and then we are in the same boat where they have to overhaul it all over again, and you will have to buy another new car because where they have to stick this hardware just isn't going to work. You just can't predict at this point what minor changes they will need to make between now and then which would make trying to promise a retrofit a bad idea (because either they stick it through and it costs them a fortune, or they break the promise and everyone jumps all over Tesla for yet another failed promise).
I'm terribly sorry, but I wouldn't hold out for anything crazy on the AP front yet, nor would I hold out for some kind of promise for a retrofit now or in the future. If full autonomy capable hardware is what you are holding out for, I would look toward the 2 year timeline that they gave previously (which should be end of 2017).
