Leica advocates the decisive moment and the concept of solving the problem in one photo. It is completely involved in the shooting process, so it relies heavily on manual focus. Secondly, Leica has achieved the position of being the No. 1 rangefinder in the world, and has accumulated thousands of patents on rangefinders, as well as optical patents and processes for rangefinder structure lenses. All production lines, R&D accumulation, and workers are rangefinders. System, if you give up the rangefinder and become a SLR, the cost will be too high.
The rangefinder structure determines that autofocus will never be able to compete with the SLR structure. The previous failure of CONTAX G SYSTEM has proved this. The rangefinder should be fully manual. Finally, Leica is proud of its lenses. Every Leica lens is assembled by hand and debugged during assembly. Leica lenses are known as century-old lenses. The 1930 ELMAR lens is now transferred to a mirrorless camera and still has a lens that surpasses the mirrorless camera. Regarding the optical level, if it is an automatic lens, can it be guaranteed to still work normally after 60 years? In terms of size, any Leica lens is often only 1/2 or smaller than a SLR lens of the same grade. This half is the characteristic of Leica, and it makes no sense to turn it into an automatic lens.