If that was the case and with Googles money and power, they might had a better chance of creating a better car as well as adding self driving in the car much faster if we look at google car. ( offcourse that is still years away )
Funnily enough, having loads of cash doesn't always result in a better product. The awful products that cash-rich companies have churned out in the past decade are too numerous to mention (including several examples from Google).
Also, it's not obvious that a software company can build a great car, or a car company can build great software. User-facing car software has been uniformly awful. Google's self-driving car prototypes, while cute (in the so-ugly-its-cute way), aren't particularly inspiring as automobiles. This separation of concerns lets both companies focus on their strengths (which can be combined down the road, as long as the self-driving technology becomes licensable). Although I imagine Tesla will still build its own self-driving technology, and Google will build more buggies. But even that's preferable to acquisition, because it allows cross-pollination of ideas from two separate entities.
There would be a short production run of small cars with cheerful color schemes (not dissimilar from Car2Go styled smartcars) sold as "development" units. Car journalists would have a difficult time getting their hands on them, but google woud ensure that SF tech bloggers would get them. These cars would stand out in public in all of the wrong ways, and soon anyone driving one would be labeled a techie asshole. Future revisions would never materialize.
TL;DR name one company Google acquired where they didn't kill that company's awesome product within a couple years, regardless of how awesome / market-leading / profitable it was.
It's not yet bad enough to say that they killed YouTube, but I'm afraid they might get there.
But more than half the companies in that range I don't recognize, so maybe their product is still around (or is fully functional, but only within Google Docs or something).
You're also ignoring the fact that many acquisitions wouldn't have survived without being acquired and their products would have shut down (or "pivoted" until they were unrecognizable). Tesla obviously wasn't in that category, but that actually makes it harder to compare to historical data, as few companies really parallel it well.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
Presumably you mean if it's shut down it will be a great example, but right now it's actually a great example of the opposite: improving the products of the acquiring company while keeping the acquired product going. You could put up more walls between the two, but at some point that becomes just investing, not acquisition.
Put the Waze acquisition onto Tesla. Google buys Tesla just as the Model S is coming out, and starts using the technology to benefit their own products. Which products it would benefit I'm not sure, but maybe they improve the batteries for Android phones, or start using the Model S as the testbed for their self-driving cars, or something. Meanwhile the Model S stays as it was in 2013, with some minor improvements. This would be a terrible outcome!
I'm not arguing that a Tesla acquisition would have been better than the outcome we got, there's almost no way it would have been, but I would argue that that would be true for any company doing the acquiring. Acquisitions are just really tough for the identity of a product by their very nature.
Well then, we agree. I'm not saying, "Thank goodness Google didn't acquire them." I'm saying, "Thank goodness they weren't acquired" and it just happens to be in the context of a story about Google doing the acquiring.
I can't think of any company that could have acquired Tesla where the outcome would have been favorable for the things I personally want. There were rumors going around a while ago about Apple buying them, and my reaction was the same there.
I also find that eight-year guarantee to be rather unimpressive. The Model 3 will be the true start of Tesla's game changing, and the deal was basically that Tesla could be broken up or killed once the Model 3 showed up.
This deal was only on the table because Tesla was in crisis. The moment they recovered, it went away. Clearly they thought that they could do better on their own than they could if they were part of Google, and I see no reason to disagree.
A. Musk has stated self-driving cars would be essentially finished by this summer, and only the laws and policies are lagging behind and keeping it from being fully released.
B. "How much more they could have been"? They're expanding at a ridiculous pace and are on-track to release a main-stream affordable car within a few years, something the established automakers have evidently been unable to do at all despite all their resources and established infrastructure.
C. "A better car"? What exactly are you comparing it to? Objectively the Model S has gotten the highest scores ever on nearly every single survey it's been part of. If you have a personal quibble with it, don't make out like that's the car's fault. If you're not happy with it "merely" being the best car on the market, I really don't know what you're looking for.
Even a few years would be pretty cool. I hope he's right!