“My autopilot almost killed me” — with these words begins an investigation of the German newspaper Handelsblatt, dedicated to the inner workings of Tesla. The newspaper received 100 gigabytes of data from Tesla servers from insiders, analyzed them for several months and came to very unpleasant conclusions.
Who, how and why leaked Tesla's internal documents to a German newspaper is unknown. The Handelsblatt investigation itself, published on May 25, is under paywall, so it did not immediately receive wide publicity. The files obtained by the German publication cover the period from 2015 to March 2022 and contain a wide variety of data – payrolls, customer bank details, social security numbers, internal production and test reports, complaints and much more. Handelsblatt employees spent about five months analyzing the data received, sent many questions to Tesla, but instead of answering them, they received a request to delete illegally obtained data and threats of legal action.
The main focus of the investigation is on the autopilot – they say, everything is much worse with it than it seemed before, but in general, nothing new. We have already written more than once about why the development of the Tesla autopilot is a dead end from which there is no way out in the foreseeable future. We also wrote more than once that the Tesla autopilot violates traffic rules and gets into accidents, including fatal ones. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been investigating accidents involving Tesla electric vehicles with the autopilot turned on since 2021, it has not yet been completed.
The Handelsblatt database contains more than 3,000 Tesla customer complaints about dangerous autopilot driving, including 2,400 complaints about acceleration problems, 1,500 complaints about braking problems, among which there are 139 cases of unnecessary emergency braking and 383 cases of braking in front of phantom obstacles, that is, due to incorrect assessment of the traffic situation by artificial intelligence. More than a thousand real accidents due to incorrect operation of the autopilot, self-driving electric vehicles flew off the road into a ditch, crashed into poles, buildings and other cars.
Leaking personal data of employees and customers can cost Tesla several billion dollars, but Elon Musk still has a lot of billions, so this is not a problem. The problem is different: based on the information they had, the German colleagues came to the conclusion that Musk runs the company in an authoritarian regime, demanding results from employees at any cost and trying to personally control everything, from the choice of anode material in battery cells to the design of door handles. The accelerated development of the autopilot resulted in thousands of accidents and dozens of deaths, despite the fact that the final goal – a fully self-driving car – cannot be achieved at the present stage of human development.
Tesla is the only large company on planet Earth, which officially does not have a public relations department (PR department), because such is the whim of Elon Musk, we are already used to this. But it turned out that Tesla ignores not only the press, but also its own customers: an analysis of internal data shows that the company really does not like to answer letters, preferring to respond to customer complaints and claims verbally so that there is no evidence. It has long been noted that Elon Musk inadequately responds even to justified claims, slipping into insults of the interlocutor, and this inevitably leaves an imprint on the general ethics of the company.
To be fair, we note that the ethics of modern large corporations in general raises many questions and worries, hundreds of books and thousands of scientific papers have been written about this, but Tesla, which is at the forefront of technological progress, and the charismatic figure of Elon Musk attract the most attention today.
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