People love to call out the Model 3, but Tesla makes almost 2,000 cars a week. They obviously are having a problem with the battery for it. As a general problem, they are past making a few hundred cars a quarter.
They always overpromised by a few months. It's been a pattern since the start. Apart from the delay they have delivered on their promises after a while.
I mean you can think of their estimations what you want. It could be a bit too much optimism (although can there be too much optimism for a startup?), it could be a marketing tactic. But they've consistently beaten the skeptics until now.
I think this is an endemic problem with Elon Musk himself. He's always very optimistic about all his ventures (Tesla, SpaceX, SpaceX's Texas launch facility, Hyperloop...). He seems to have issues with estimating real-world issues that creep into every project.
However, like you said, he does always seem to get there in the end, one way or another.
To quote Wikipedia, which you may not have read before typing, despite your advising others to "look it up": "However, in some cases, ad hominem attacks can be non-fallacious; i.e., if the attack on the character of the person is directly tackling the argument itself." I.E. the personal characteristics cited do impune the argument.
A consistent history of blind rejection or enthusiasm is a characteristic that does impune the veracity of the argument, since the world isn't really like that. (Proof not necessary since relevance is what is in question.) That is, manic-depressive characteristics on the part of the speaker obviously do affect the probability that an statement or argument is true and raising them as relevant is thus not fallacious. False, quite possibly, but not fallacious or irrelevant.
Yours is a now very common misapprehension of "ad hominem", I've contradicted it here before. I am unsure where it comes from, except perhaps an exaggerated modern "amour propre," since this criticism can be used to deflect various forms of personal criticisms even when directly to the point. I may be wrong but I think this error is quite modern, I don't remember encountering it decades ago, ever. But then, this technical phrase may not have been in common parlance at that time.
I would give you this much: a false call of "ad hominem" is technically a red herring (via a false claim), rather than a straw man; since straw men arguments distort, then reject/disprove/falsify others claims; whereas you outright rejected their claim as irrelevant (rather than untrue) with no distortion of the meaning of the other's words (only distortion of the relevance of his words or the meaning of your own words - namely ad hominem) being necessary for that trick.
I will give you this much. Your length response sound like you're a pretty educated person.
I don't feel like putting in the effort to figure out if this presentation of "strawman" is meta-ironic in that it is itself a strawman, but I can't tell that it isn't.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear