He can be arrogant in some interviews (I don't personally know him), but I doubt that we can discuss he isn't smart as fuck.
If my sunday psychology profile is correct, he seems to be passionated and fast to hack around and displeased by big corporations business model + slowness + suboptimality. Thus trying to dig diagonally on his own without the enterprise cruft. So far so good, the issue is that it seems he's lying about his abilities. He managed to do 20% and spins it as 70% claiming he'll be at 100% before everybody else. Without independant testing and legislation of course.
I've a friend that has a comma neo with openpilot and it works enough well. Is not perfect, but they are on something.
The best projects that we know today were made by hackers with 0 enterprise skills.
I cannot compare anything in the casual software world, no matter how complex it is, to driving a car in streets. It's bridging physics and AI. Maybe hotz has a point and other SDV module vendors are as fake but that's irrelevant.
Edit: I'm actually curious now that I think about it. Are there any good examples of hacker projects (or specifically projects that aren't intended to make money or pay people's salaries) that had to deal with any sort of regulatory hurdles?
It worked for Cruise. Got them a billion dollars and a seat on GM's board.
That was surprising, because GM had a good self-driving effort with CMU, and had progressed to driving in Washington DC traffic autonomously.[1] That was way ahead of Cruise, and working in 2013. Then, somehow, GM totally blew it and lost that project, with the people going elsewhere.
[1] https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2013/september/sep...
Every Toyota comes equipped with lane following and smart cruise control. They call it Toyota Safety Sense, and even the lowest priced, $18k Corolla has it.