If these $45k cars are fully automatic (a big if for sure), then $45k will be a bargain price and would probably capture at least half the new car market.

They're not. They have the same lane keeping and autimatic cruise control as the average $45k car.

Or what you can get from Honda for around $20-25k.

Possibly worse given the accidents.

This is frankly delusional thinking.

(a) Tesla aren't the leaders in the self driving car space. Waymo arguably is, (b) almost all of the car makers have self driving car programs and most importantly (c) why would the traditional car makers just sit back, do nothing and allow Tesla to eat up the entire market ?

If Tesla can make it work without lidar, and that’s a huge “if”, they have a massive head start in training data. From a conference panel a few years ago that had Tesla, Waymo and some others on stage at the same time, Tesla was getting as much data in a week as Google was in months. That type of training data asymmetry is ripe for blowing past others. Again though that’s all conditioned on not needing lidar and I remain far from convinced their approach works for a true self-driving system.

Waymo's cars are connected to Waymo's servers with, I guess, gigabit ethernet (after they go back to base for the night), Tesla's cars are connected by mobile data, they'd have to pay billions to cell phone networks to get as much data.

I think Tesla is not the leader, they probably made a crucial mistake in not using the expensive lidar. But they have be far the most cars on the road with early versions of this tech that has worked pretty well in my car for 4 years.