CMV: Elon Musk is bad for the development of self-driving cars.

This may seem counter-intuitive, as Elon Musk has been a long proponent of self-driving vehicles and has been actively working towards their adoption. The thing is, I believe Elon Musk gives the wrong impression of how hard it is to develop self-driving cars. In 2016, Elon Musk said Tesla was 2 to 3 years away from full autopilot. In 2021, Musk said Tesla had solved vision-only full self-driving, but was still working on validation and golden testing. "I am extremely confident that this can be made to work with production cars and be safer than a person, [but] I think we’ve got to get to a point where we’re sure that that’s true, where there’s no reasonable chance that we can’t get there," he said. <br><br>This is the problem; the idea that full self-driving cars are 'right around the corner' is misleading. The reality is that many companies have been working on self-driving for decades with relatively little to show for it. Waymo was founded in 2009, and as of 2022, they still only offer a fully driverless ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona, in a controlled environment that has been heavily mapped, and the cars aren't allowed to reposition themselves if they get blocked by construction. <br><br>The development of self-driving cars requires a lot more than simply developing an AI that can drive. Self-driving cars require a lot of work in terms of hardware and mapping to create a database that can be used to navigate. When Elon Musk makes sweeping statements about full self-driving capabilities, he creates unrealistic timelines in the minds of the general public and investors. This makes it harder and more expensive for other companies to develop self-driving capabilities, because investors may think that the timelines and budgets are being bloated, or that they've already lost the race to Tesla. I think this hinders the development of self-driving cars in the long run. The best thing that could happen for the adoption of self-driving cars would be Tesla removing it from their priorities and Elon Musk stopping talking about it. <br><br>PS: I have new, shiny chambers platinum, so I can reward people more easily now. Thanks to everyone taking the time to read this, I'll try to respond to as many replies as I can.