FSD has been a year or two away every year since 2015.

There was going to be a voyage to Mars by 2024.

Funding was secured to take Tesla private at $420 a share.

He was going to save multiple trillions of dollars with DOGE.

There would be "close to zero new cases" of Covid by April 2020.

These are all off the top of my head, I'm sure we could list dozens more of these types of claims.

Nobody should be surprised when Elon lies, the real question is why does the media or anyone else continue to give anything he says any air of legitimacy at all given his track record of claims vs reality?

SpaceX (minus his Mars claims, which he has been clearly backtracking on for the past year or so) is the only one of his enterprises that isn't almost entirely hype and vibes based at this point, and from everything I've read it is because they uniquely understand how to mitigate the damage caused by his persistent manic overreach.

Hardware obviously gets better over time and it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing for Tesla to say that HW3 is decent but HW4 would likely be required for future FSD capability. But they didn't do that. Maybe because they didn't want people to stop buying HW3 cars or maybe because they hate admitting that anything they do isn't perfect. Or maybe they really believed their own hype that software can magically compensate for inadequate hardware. Either way, it's not ideal behavior for creating trust in a brand.