The Tesla’s problems are piling up. In addition, they come from various sides. For starters, the company’s shares have lost 65% of their value in one year. That is, it has lost about 672,000 million dollars, according to the New York Times. To continue, according to The Guardian, it has been discovered that a 2016 video that the company used to promote its autonomous car technology was prepared to make believe that the cars at that time had capabilities that they did not have. For example, stopping at a red light, and accelerating when its green light came on.
This is stated by a high-level engineer from the company: Ashok Elluswamy, Director of Autopilot Software. This software is the one used by the company’s cars for autonomous driving, and his statement was not made to the media, but rather in a testimony taken last July and which will be used as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for an accident in 2018 in which an Apple engineer, Walter Huang, died. In the investigation of the accident, carried out in 2020, the accident was blamed on a distraction by Huang and the limitations of the Autopilot.
The mentioned video, which is still on the Tesla website, was published in October 2016. Elon Musk, its CEO, spread it on social networks as proof that a Tesla Model X was driving itself. In the video you see a text stating that the person sitting in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons and that she is not doing anything because the car drives itself.
According to Elluswamy, Tesla’s Autopilot team recorded a “demonstration of system capabilities» at Musk’s request. However, the company notes that it asks drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be in control of their vehicles when using Autopilot. Tesla’s technology is designed to assist with steering, braking, speed, and lane changes, but as Tesla notes on its website, “that does not make a vehicle autonomous«.
But according to the video, created with 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a Menlo Park (California) home to the then company headquarters in Palo Alto, it does not show it that way. Several drivers intervened in it to take control on the test routes, and when they were trying to show that the Model X could park itself without the intervention of a driver, a car of this test model crashed into a fence in the parking lot. Tesla.
Elluswamy noted in his statement that “the purpose of the video was not to show precisely what was available to customers in 2016, but rather what was possible to integrate into the system«. But what Musk said on Twitter when he posted the video was that “Tesla drives itself (without any human intervention) on urban routes, from highways to streets, and looks for a parking spot«.
The United States Department of Justice opened an investigation some time ago into what Tesla claimed about the autonomous driving of its vehicles in 2021, when it pointed out that they could drive themselves. He did so after several accidents, some with deaths, in which Autopilot was involved.
The version in Elluswamy’s statement follows the one given to the New York Times in 2021, when this medium assured that several Tesla engineers had created the mentioned 2016 video to promote Autopilot without making public that the route was predetermined or that a car had crashed while trying to complete the recording, then citing anonymous sources. So when Elluswamy had to answer a question about whether the video showed the performance of Testa’s Autopilot system available in a car in production at the time, the Tesla executive denied that this was the case.
The problems of Autopilot, Tesla’s software
The software Autopilot had from the beginning a certain tendency to crash into police vehicles. No one knew why, although Tesla engineers were aiming for static objects combined with car lights and flashes, which they believed fooled his Artificial Intelligence. The car was driving normally, with the on-board computer controlled, and suddenly it went left or right and crashed. This happened at least a dozen times in about three years.
For a company that relied on some optimism among investors to maintain its share value, these accidents could have been a problem. But for its CEO, Elon Musk, they became an opportunity. Every accident generates data, and Musk was sure that with enough data, they could speed up development of what would be the first fully autonomous car in the world. He believed in it so much that he came to make very risky predictions. For example, in 2019 he said that he was sure that it would be possible for someone to fall asleep behind the wheel of a Tesla with Autopilot and wake up at their destination at the end of 2020. It is clear that it was not fulfilled.
Tesla still needs crash data, and its future may depend on whether drivers know they are affected by this data collection experiment. Also if his fondness for risk is as high as Musk’s, that he came to write to Jim Riley, father of one of the victims of a Tesla accident that crashed while accelerating. Riley asked Musk if he could update his software to set a top speed on the cars, along with other restrictions on acceleration and radio access, as well as how far the car could drive from home.
Musk, who unlike other CEOs does sometimes address people who are injured by one of his products, but rejected the requested changes, saying that if there were too many configurations, the car would be too complicated for most to use. from the people. He pointed out that he wanted to do what was best for the most people, as he often points out. This, together with his particular ethics, and his interest in Artificial Intelligence, leads him to think that in the long term, his way of acting can save many lives.
Tesla, about to face several lawsuits
But Musk has to attend more to the short term, because trouble is looming for him and the company in the coming months. The first trial against Tesla will be held in February for a crash involving Autopilot. In the following months there will be another four trials for the same reason.
According to him representative of the prosecution lawyers in three of these cases, Donald Slavik, a conventional car company would have negotiated a deal. But Musk wants to go to court, even if he’s not going to be good for Tesla. In addition, he can be much more expensive in terms of compensation if Autopilot is shown to be the culprit. The arrival of autonomous vehicles was not foreseen in this way. In the United States, on average, there is at least one Autopilot-related accident every day, and Tesla is under investigation by the country’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The purpose of this technology was to reduce the number of accidents and fatalities, but it seems that for now it has not yet found the key to it.
The various allegations in the pending lawsuits all point in the same direction: Tesla routinely inflated consumer expectationsY minimized the dangers which involved the use of Autopilot. The cars did not have sufficient driver supervision because Musk did not want the drivers to think that the car needed human supervision. As he himself pointed out in 2019, «If you have a system that is at or below the level of humans in reliability, then supervised driving makes sense. But if your system is so much better, more reliable than a human, then monitoring doesn’t help much.«.
Drivers received no warnings about automatic braking or unsignalized lane changes. Tesla pointed out the limitations of the technology in its owner’s manual, but posted viral videos of a Tesla navigating a complicated route without human intervention. His ideal client was someone who was willing to take the blame when something went wrong, but with unlimited faith in the next version.
In a statement, a Tesla engineer makes it abundantly clear: “we want the customer to know that, first of all, you have to have confidence in the car. Everything works as it should. And secondly, the reason for your accident or the reason for it is always related to you.«. But not all Tesla drivers are like this, and Autopilot lawsuit lawyers may agree that its AI is getting better, but only thanks to early adopters and those who continue to drive Tesla who could suffer. an accident.
Opinions about your Full Autonomous Driving System (FSD) on the Internet. are found. Some show their numerous failures, which, as can be seen in the trips in Teslas equipped with FSD systems that appear in a New York Times report, still exist. Little by little, yes is correcting errors in the database and complaints, many times provided by the owners and drivers of the cars for months after having been in situations of greater or lesser risk. Others praise what the company and its CEO do, no matter what happens, and often make comments showing their anger at whoever reveals these failures.
His activity on Twitter has eroded Musk’s image
This philosophy has, of course, made its way to Twitter, where he has made highly controversial decisions since buying the company, bent on “take measures that maximize the overall happiness of the public«. But what it has done is anger a more than remarkable number of its users. The last one is the blocking your API to certain third-party apps. This has meant that historical apps that even had a lot of influence on the initial development of Twitter, such as twitterrific Y tweetbothave stopped working, probably forever, after days without confirming that the access problem they were having was not a bug, but an intentional “blackout” of their API.
Another of his companies Neuralink, has also recently been the focus of controversy: tests for its medical devices have caused the needless deaths of dozens of laboratory animals after using them in experiments. Clearly, for him, the suffering of a few hundred animals was worth it to improve human lives in the future.
Again, the long term appears, and the resolution of big problems in mind for the future. But what was said: the short term, and problems, haunt Musk, increasingly criticized by Tesla shareholders for paying too much attention to Twitter and too little to Tesla. Of course, in recent months, he has stopped promising that fully autonomous Teslas are just around the corner, because obviously, the problems with his driving software are greater than he expected.
At the same time, the man who was previously considered a genius who was going to change the automotive industry sector is no longer seen as such, mainly due to his decisions and actions on Twitter. He seems increasingly distracted from his other posts, increasingly frustrating investors and analysts. Many wonder what will happen to his shares and the company, as well as Musk, in 2023. The answer lies only with Musk and the company’s board of directors.
