I don't think he's a fraudster. I think he's a visionary who sometimes sees things more the way he imagines them than the way they really are.

Things aren't as black and white as a bunch of people on here make them out to be. It's possible to deliver great products while dreaming too big and failing on others. The quality of being able to take risks and fail repeatedly until finally succeeding is one that most entrepreneurs possess.

I don't know why everyone gives this guy such a hard time. And I don't know why he has to be either a genius or a crackpot but not both at the same time. He can be enormously successful - like getting a new car company off the ground, making electric cars mainstream, putting unprecedented driving aids in the hands of consumers, rocket launches at an incredibly affordable cost - and not hit a home run with other ambitious projects like hyperloop, underground tunnels, robotaxis, etc.

Personally, I think the robotaxi idea is stupid. I get that there's a market for autonomous fleet vehicles but which individual car buyers are asking for a taxi service? I didn't buy a 70k car so that it could drive a bunch of strangers around and make me a couple bucks on the side. And, assuming they pull it off (which I doubt), I'd be pretty pissed if the cost of new Teslas went up because of the availability of some service I had no interest in to begin with. It would alienate me as a customer.

That said, I love my Tesla. I use Autopilot every day and it has been life changing. It's not perfect, but it works well enough for 90% of my driving. I rode in one of those self driving Lyft cars recently. It required 2 operators, the driver had to repeatedly take over and it was very similar to my Tesla in terms of ability. The difference is the Tesla is in the hands of consumers. It would be very difficult for me to go back to a regular gas car and I don't think I could go back to daily driving without advanced driver aids like Autopilot.

I have my doubts about city self driving. When I'm coming up to a light and it's obstructed by a big truck that's in front of me I wonder how they will solve that problem. Or railroad tracks, pedestrians, animals running into the road, etc. Those seems like insurmountable problems to me. I'm willing to wait and see though. They've already achieved more than I thought I would see in my lifetime. I won't begrudge them the occasional failure.

>I don't know why everyone gives this guy such a hard time

I literally wrote that hes advertising the dangerous idea of any kid of self driving

the other reply to me even used "autopilot" in their comment. if you dont think branding lane assist as "autopilot" is dangerous and still defend elon then alright. have fun writing walls of text worshipping techbro jesus?

>repeatedly pretending that full self driving was anything more than a pipe dream is dangerous. everyone knows that except people that enable his scamming

Drove my Model 3 on autopilot today. Entered a roadway that had recently been repaved, and lacking lane markers. The Model 3 couldn’t handle it and wouldn’t let me engage autopilot. There aren’t robotaxis until that trivial problem is solved.

It’s surprisingly good at 99.9% of scenarios. Unfortunately I encounter one of those 0.1% events each day, and they’re always different. For example, yesterday there was a tractor driving down the road in the lane next to me. It had axles which stuck out almost two feet from the wheel. Suspect that scenario isn’t going to be handled properly as the appropriate bounding box is non-standard.