Tesla CEO Elon Musk dreams big but often delivers late

April 22 (Reuters) - Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has a long history of making ambitious promises and often delivering late. Many of his biggest ideas are still in the works.

Musk has described himself as pathologically optimistic, saying he does deliver in the end, "which is the important thing". His ambition and success with electric vehicles has turned Tesla into the world's most valuable automaker.

But now, as the automaker faces declining sales and strong competition, Musk is trying to pivot to robotaxis and autonomous driving - bets that some experts say could be years away.

Here are some of Musk's promises over the years:

Musk's most famous unfulfilled promise revolves around "FSD", Tesla Full Self-Driving software. FSD is not fully autonomous, but Musk for years has been promising it would be.

He initially spoke about self-driving capabilities in 2015, saying autonomous cars would be available within three years.

But he missed that deadline and has promised almost each year since 2020 that Tesla's vehicles would achieve full self-driving capabilities. In 2023, Musk called himself the "boy who cried FSD" - an admission of his missed targets.

Tesla has said it would release an "unsupervised" version of FSD, which presumably would not require human oversight, in California this year, without offering more information.

On Tuesday, he forecast millions of Teslas operating fully autonomously by the second half of next year.

In 2016, Musk announced plans for a mass-market electric vehicle priced around $35,000. The Model 3 elec...
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