[mlindner]

He's never been a toxic bullshitter. He aims big, and gives dates with lots of caveats/uncertainties attached to them (that the media never reports). In a recent interview he stated a great statement "At SpaceX we specialize in converting the impossible into the late" which is a nice truthism about all of his companies.

Tesla cars are quite reliable but their unreliability is over reported giving the perception of a higher unreliability than is actually the case.

[FireBeyond]

> and gives dates with lots of caveats/uncertainties attached to them (that the media never reports)

When is FSD coming? According to Musk, he's said every year for the last seven years running that it is coming "this year" or "months away", and the only "caveat" he's ever mentioned is "subject to regulatory approval", and that is clearly factually incorrect. FSD is not, and certainly was not "complete but for legal approvals".

Unless you have some other explanation for what "You will be able to drive coast to coast, with zero driver interventions, this year".

At some point repeatedly "aiming big" becomes a caricature, and then eventually seen for the BS/hype it is.

[mettamage]

> At some point repeatedly "aiming big" becomes a caricature, and then eventually seen for the BS/hype it is.

I disagree. There are different incentives at play. I'll list the few I see.

When does FSD come? You can't say stuff like "10 years out". That'd be a hard sell in academia and an even harder sell in business. Moreover, Tesla is trying to move as fast as possible. The other issue is that they have to give a deadline estimate. As we all know, the business world cannot operate without any deadline estimates. So Elon gives them. If it sounds vaguely familiar to software engineering that's because it's the same misaligned incentive at play here, but then at a larger scale.

Also, he aimed big, and some of those big aims actually became reality. Isn't it the case with R&D and innovation that you have to fail a lot? It isn't easy.

So now we're in a situation where there are people that demand: whatever Tesla decides to innovate on must be a success and accurately estimated time-wise. No organization in the world has ever been able to do that, so to expect that is a fool's errand, IMO.

[FireBeyond]

FSD is a hard problem. Other companies, public ones, have no issue talking about it as a multi/many year project (at best).

Elon constantly says "it's months away", "it's this year", "no, really, this year". Hell he just recently pushed a date back from June to September because "we might be able to announce something".

Having seen the issues with FSD versions dropping today, no-one can seriously think that some September announcement is going to be a "solution".

I get what you're saying. And it's not about being "aspirational". It's repeatedly, to the point of eye-rolling, over-promising, and underdelivering.

[op00to]

Consumer reports says the model 3 is around average reliability and the rest me the models are much worse.