I think he's extremely optimistic and confident. He's been extremely successful so far, he's a billionaire, has done many things that nay sayers would have call

I think he's extremely optimistic and confident. He's been extremely successful so far, he's a billionaire, has done many things that nay sayers would have called impossible (ie: paypal, landing rockets, building electric cars with very competitive performance). It's not hard to see why Musk might believe he can do anything. He's taken big risks and gotten a lot of positive reinforcement over the last two decades. I agree that his timeline for robotaxis is probably over optimistic, and that there are many unsolved problems. Self-driving isn't all they have to solve. They also have to solve complex and annoying problems such as having self-driving cars find the people they are supposed to pick up, and also having the cars somehow find charging, find parking, etc. Furthermore, Tesla's claim of 1 million robotaxis assumes that everyone who owns a Tesla with full self driving would want to rent them out as part of the Tesla Network. That's very unrealistic. Most people probably prefer having their car be always available and not subjecting it to potential damage/towing/fines (more driving, more risk). Still, I wouldn't say Musk is ignorant about the state of self driving. They have self driving cars which they have demoed to people on their investor day. He just makes this probably incorrect assumption that it's all "just software" from here, and everything should be easy to fix. Software isn't easier than hardware. It could also be the case that changes do need to be made for the hardware in order to get high enough reliability, there is no guarantee that the hardware is completely right in its current iteration.