For years many mocked Musk for believing pure vision self-driving was possible

He's mocked because he has lied about it constantly for a decade.

In 2016 Tesla claimed "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

They faked the full self-driving demo video: https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-full-self-driving-vide...

Musk promised 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. That was a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

The timeline of lies is tedious: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

Musk is plainly not interested in credibility. He'll keep lying for as long as the lies keep working. True believers like Whole Mars Catalog will always find a way to rationalize the lies to themselves.

I never heard anyone say it was "impossible", but I did hear many people suggest that a vision-only solution is statistically less-safe than a rangefinding-assisted solution.

Technically you can make an autopilot work with nothing but inertial navigation. The Swedes did it in the 70s. The hard part is making it accurate and reliable, and catching the edge-cases.

Isn't the mocking more about the stupid predictions he keep on giving surrounding fsd (and everything else).. heck if we wait long enough most everything is possible.

I drive in fog and rain. Give me radar at the very least. Visible light has real limitations, and can easily be fooled, accidentally or maliciously.

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.

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.

Tesla certainly wasn't the only one working on vision-based driving assistance technologies, nor the only to succeed at various aspects of it.

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.

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.