There was no reason to think that vision-based self-driving wasn't possible - many vehicles today have varying forms of self driving abilities that use only vision and have for some time now.<p>But Musk regularly made wild claims about how they already had it working and it was going to be released within the next two years. He convinced a lot of people to pay a premium for the FSD beta that only now is capable of driving along a well maintained city street on a dry, sunny day.<p>Tesla certainly wasn't the only one working on vision-based driving assistance technologies, nor the only to succeed at various aspects of it.<p>Musk loves to speak about himself and his work as if he is some pariah suffering at the hands of the establishment, but nothing could be further from the truth. The hard working folks at Tesla have moved mountains and would have done so with or without his endless tweet storms. The rest of the industry has pressed on too, and as the technology improved, they too would have moved closer towards full FSD if Tesla didn't get there first.<p>Elon Musk's greatest trick is convincing millions of people that he is a genius that is responsible for all the technological success that his thousands of employees have worked hard for.