Tesla CEO Elon Musk is known for confidently underestimating the time it will take for anticipated advancements across many of his ventures, like Tesla, X, and SpaceX.
Some view that as an effort to push his company to meet goals, which may be the primary motivation, though a new Electrek editorial posited that some of these ambitious, unrealized promises look less like an expression of optimism and more like intentional deception.
On Thursday, Electrek’s Editor-in-Chief, Fred Lambert, published an article sparked by Musk’s then-recent exchange with Tesla investor and Musk acolyte Sawyer Merritt.
Four days prior, Merritt tweeted a brief clip from an interview featuring Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. In the clipped segment, an interviewer asked Khosrowshahi about the immediate future of autonomous electric vehicles.
In response to a question about whether Waymo’s multi-sensor approach would come out on top, or if Tesla’s “camera-only” setup would reign supreme, Khosrowshahi doubted cameras alone could bring about “superhuman levels of safety.”
Musk responded to Merritt, challenging Khosrowshahi’s take.
“Lidar and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention. … This sensor ambiguity causes increased, not decreased, risk,” Musk said in part.
The conversation caught Lambert’s eye and reminded him of a discussion he’d had with Musk back in 2021. Lambert took issue with Musk’s characterization of lidar and radar sensors as “more dangerous” than Tesla’s camera-only system, a contention he said was, in essence, a lie.
“It’s not only false, Musk told me directly that he agreed that radar and vision could be safer than just vision, right after he had Tesla remove the radars from its vehicles,” Lambert asserted.
He appended screenshots of the conversation to support his claim.
“We are now in 2025, and unlike what Musk claimed, Tesla has yet to deliver on its self-driving promises, but the CEO is doubling down on his vision-only approach,” Lambert added.
