Musk's pattern of making increasingly grandiose and unfulfilled promises is a deliberate strategy. It distracts media and investors from fundamental issues, like Tesla being valued as a tech monopoly instead of a car company.

Tesla's camera-only system gives it a significant cost advantage over Waymo's LiDAR-equipped vehicles. However, current data shows a Waymo vehicle crashes every 400,000 miles, while Tesla's crashes every 50,000. Tesla's ability to scale hinges entirely on proving its cheaper technology can become as safe.

The robotics sector is poised for a hype cycle collapse as companies inevitably miss ambitious timelines. This environment favors incumbents like Tesla and Waymo, who have deep capital reserves and manufacturing expertise, mirroring the evolution of the self-driving car industry.

When investing in high-risk, long-development categories like autonomous vehicles, the key signal is undeniable consumer pull. Once Waymo became the preferred choice in San Francisco, it validated the investment thesis despite a decade of development and high costs.

To overcome public skepticism about safety, autonomous vehicle companies need a grand public demonstration. A livestreamed, overnight "robo-taxi" journey between cities, framed as a "self-driving hotel," could serve as a modern spectacle to prove the technology is safe and build consumer trust, much like elephants walking the Brooklyn Bridge did.

Drawing from his Tesla experience, Karpathy warns of a massive "demo-to-product gap" in AI. Getting a demo to work 90% of the time is easy. But achieving the reliability needed for a real product is a "march of nines," where each additional 9 of accuracy requires a constant, enormous effort, explaining long development timelines.

A technology like Waymo's self-driving cars could be statistically safer than human drivers yet still be rejected by the public. Society is unwilling to accept thousands of deaths directly caused by a single corporate algorithm, even if it represents a net improvement over the chaotic, decentralized risk of human drivers.

Whenever Tesla's core automotive business faces headwinds—like falling market share or intense competition—Elon Musk introduces a new, futuristic narrative, such as the Optimus robot. This strategy aims to reposition the company as an AI leader and distract investors from underwhelming auto industry fundamentals.

The public holds new technologies to a much higher safety standard than human performance. Waymo could deploy cars that are statistically safer than human drivers, but society would not accept them killing tens of thousands of people annually, even if it's an improvement. This demonstrates the need for near-perfection in high-stakes tech launches.