[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.