For Martin Eberhard, co-founder of Tesla, making Autopilot the brand’s priority is a big mistake. In a long interview with Insider, the former executive criticizes the strategy and politics of Elon Musk. Explanations.
If Elon Musk is the face of Tesla today, the billionaire is not the founder of the brand. Indeed, we owe the creation of Tesla in 2003 to two men: Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. It was only a year later, in 2004, that the current owner of Twitter became chairman of the company’s board of directors.
During the years that followed, relations between Elon Musk and Martin Eberhard were never in good shape, and in 2007, the billionaire ousted Eberhard as CEO of the company. Since then, Martin Eberhard has continued his career in the automotive industry and participated in the launch of several electric cars.
Diversification of Tesla’s activities criticized
And while Elon Musk is due to present Tesla’s future strategy at a new Investor Day conference on March 1, 2023, Martin Eberhard has just given a river interview in the columns of the site. Insider. The opportunity for this veteran to give his point of view on the company’s current policy.
He particularly criticizes the 2016 acquisition of Solar City, a solar power company, which he calls a “distraction” for Tesla. It should be remembered that this takeover had been the subject of careful scrutiny by the authorities. For good reason, it was led by Lyndon Rive, cousin of Elon Musk. At the time, some shareholders even took legal action against the boss of SpaceX. According to them, ithe takeover had only one goal: to bail out the coffers of Solar City, then in difficulty.
Autopilot, the technology that threatens Tesla
In this interview, Martin Eberhard also discusses the case of Autopilot, which he considers to be the main threat to the sustainability of the brand. “In my opinion, we must break the habit of thinking that these autonomous driving technologies are necessarily connected to electric cars. I would love to see people think about making cars that people can drive,” he declares.
If he finds these technologies particularly useful, in particular for developing more efficient driving aids, he disapproves to see that autonomous driving has become the central element of Tesla’s communication. “Keep in mind that all that FSD bullshit (editor’s note: Full Self Driving, Tesla’s autonomous driving system) autonomous, on autopilot – none of that existed when I was there. We were still busy trying to get the car to work and never thought about that at all. It came later. It requires a budget, much, much larger than what we had at the time”, he specifies.
A car is not an iPhone for Martin Eberhard
In his eyes, Elon Musk and Tesla are making a terrible mistake by considering “a car like a software platform, like an iPhone or whatever”. On this point, recent events prove him right. Each software update of the FSD beta is marked by the appearance of new bugs. Recently, Tesla admitted that the FSD could cause accidents, the fault of malfunctions allowing the “vehicle from acting unsafely at intersections”. In the process, Tesla has issued a massive recall targeting 362,000 FSD-equipped cars in the United States.
“I have an iPhone, and every time I get a software update there are bugs. It’s not very serious, it’s just an annoyance on the iPhone. But if this kind of bug appears for example in the software that controls my brakes or the steering, it can kill you”, he complains. For Martin Eberhard, the technology is still too immature to be deployed on the roads.
As you may know, Martin Eberhard is not the first to criticize Autopilot and FSD. Tesla’s self-driving technologies make the subject of several official investigations. The NHTSA, the federal agency in charge of traffic safety, has been investigating Autopilot since August 2021 after the multiplication of accidents in which the system was involved. And on February 1, 2023, the brand confirmed that the US Department of Justice was in turn investigating FSD and Autopilot. Finally, the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened investigations to determine whether Tesla has made misleading claims about the capabilities of its self-driving software.
