Tesla's Autopilot may be in trouble — here's why that doesn't matter

Tesla is shaking up its Autopilot self-driving team, making what might be called a marquee termination by saying goodbye to Chris Lattner, who joined the carmaker from Apple just six months ago to run Autopilot day-to-day.

In classic management doublespeak, Lattner said the arrangement was a bad fit and later commented that "in the end," CEO Elon Musk "and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did," Bloomberg's Dana Hull reported.

Musk is pushing hard on Autopilot at a time when the technology is deviating significantly from what the rest of the industry is pursuing. Tesla's tech is based on cameras and sensors, while the more advanced efforts from Google and Uber use lidar, a far more expensive option that senses its surroundings with lasers.

It's tempting to read between the lines of Tesla's move and conclude that Autopilot is in trouble, stuck at its current level of autonomous driving, with some interesting features such as Summon and Autopark but not yet capable of delivering on Musk's goal of sending a car from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017.

Autopilot is the state of the art for self-driving tech that's on the road in consumer applications. Everything else is either in the testing phase, intended for a fleet rollout, or less capable than Autopilot. But it's unclear whether Tesla can use its advantages, such as real-world fleet learning from its plentiful cars, to keep pace with the lidar systems.

That might sound bad, and the shake-up in Palo Alto suggests that Musk is far from happy. But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.