Uber predicted it was just a few years away in 2016.[1]
Google's Sergey Brin predicted driverless cars by 2017.[2]
BMW predicted we'd have driverless cars by 2020.[3]
Supposedly sober industry analysts predicted 2019.[4]
It's also worth pointing out that many of Elon's predictions were not predictions of a finished product, but rather predicting when Tesla would have a system "capable" of self driving, not necessarily a system capable of driving consistently and reliably. (In much the same way, I am capable of hitting a target with a crossbow, but not consistently and reliably.)
To be clear, I'm not defending Musk's predictions, only pointing out that such predictions were widespread and Musk was just one of many, many, many people who turned out to be wrong.
Uh huh. And did they take money from customers with the promise of full self-driving being just around the corner? Did they take money from customers for a product making the specific claim that it has the "hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":
Tesla has backed itself into this corner for no good reason, which is an irony considering that Teslas aren't good at backing themselves into anywhere else:
> Musk will continue to lie about it because he thinks that without full self-driving Tesla is worth basically zero
Lots of people who buy Teslas don’t care about the self driving at all. They want the best-designed, best-driving, fastest electric cars on the road with the best charging network.
> They want the best-designed, best-driving, fastest electric cars on the road with the best charging network.
Well, Europe's charging infrastructure is the best at the moment and "best driving" is subjective. So do you mean they want a Porsche Taycan in Europe? Or maybe the Audi e-tron GT? Or the Mercedes EQS? Or perhaps the BMW iX?
Many entities have released cherry-picked marketing videos of autonomy appearing to work perfectly under controlled conditions. About as convincing as TV commercials for supermarket deodorant that link use of their product to sexual desirability.
Whether Tesla is ahead or far behind others, they're the only ones exposing their technology to unsupervised assessment by independent third parties in uncontrolled, adversarial conditions. On the other hand Waymo have real, productive, actually driverless cars operating within geofenced areas right now. How do you compare the two? Anyone who claims to know which of the two is "ahead" is either smuggling in unstated qualifiers, or they're blowing smoke.
Claim two sounded a bit suspicious so I checked the quote:
" He promised, despite unhappy faces from his engineers, that it would take fewer years than he had fingers on his right hand before they were available to everyone – although the price wasn't mentioned."
So then it's not full self-driving? I don't understand. Elon has been promising full self-driving for years:
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cFTlx68itk