It's very different goals, the Tesla approach is more of a hack, which is to release things, without any liability or guarantee "we quickly hacked this together, good luck, if you die or get injured this is your problem!", and Mercedes is delivering a product that only support a few features but do it well, and they put their responsibility on it.
Not sure how that relates to the point OP was making. Unless I misunderstood his point?
> Mercedes is delivering a product that only support a few features but do it well
This naturally implies that Tesla experimented with a broader set of self-driving features in an throw-it-at-the-wall experimental fashion. Which is more of a technical/product management question than a financial/legal/marketing one. Unless OP simply means Mercedes released the same set of features just extremely restricted in what you can do with them?
If so the hacker/experimental vs limited focus on "small set of features" dichotomy is not super relevant. It's just business risk aversion or gov regulatory strategy, not product/technology development strategy.
