When the San Francisco power outage hit, autonomous vehicle systems faced their moment of truth. One platform's fleet went silent at intersections—traffic signals down, connectivity severed, service halted. The infrastructure dependency became painfully obvious.

Meanwhile, the competitor's robotaxis kept rolling. Vision-only AI system, trained on real-world driving data, zero reliance on external infrastructure. This isn't theoretical—it's what happens when you build the full stack vertically integrated from silicon to software.

The contrast cuts deeper than one bad day. It's about system resilience. When you own every layer—compute, sensors, decision-making algorithms—you eliminate single points of failure that plague distributed architectures. Real-world AI trained on actual roads beats brittle systems that need perfect conditions.

Full-stack integration isn't just engineering philosophy. It's survival in autonomous systems. When everything matters, controlling everything matters.