Tesla has been puffing up its chest, for years, for the autonomous driving functions of its vehicles. And yes, it is true that during their first years they were the reference in this regard, and that this also served as a push for other companies, both veterans of the sector and others of new creation and also some of the technological sector, decided to dedicate part of their their efforts to contribute to the evolution of this technology called to substantially change the paradigm of mobility.
The problem, as with virtually everything related to Elon Musk, is that fact and fiction, truth and lies, intermingle like meat and fat in Kobe beef, making the segregation of one part and the other very difficult. In the case of the ox, this is something very positive, of course, but if we are talking about the communication of a motor company, we will be talking about a problem, a very big problem.
As I recalled a few hours ago, in the news about the complicated relationship between the European Union and Twitter, Elon Musk announced level 5 autonomous driving in Tesla by the end of 2021. And it was not the first time, as in 2016 he stated that Tesla would reach that level in 2018. However, the statement of the engineer most responsible for these functions in the company served to once again deny a promise by Musk. Well, time has also served this purpose, since we are in May 2023, Tesla is still at level 2, while the German Mercedes already has several authorizations on both sides of the Atlantic to activate level 3.
Tesla’s autonomous driving functions, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, have problems, serious problems, legal problems, problems and, most worryingly, serious operational problems, something that has led various authorities to carry out investigations in this regard. Some problems that are born, as we have stated on many occasions before, by selling smoke and lies to trusting customers who, good God, when they read that there is a function called Full Self-Driving, they think that they are indeed going to find a car capable of driving itself.
It seems, however, that what we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg. According to an investigation carried out by the German media Handelsblatt, which has had access to leaked company documents, Tesla has received thousands of safety complaints about autonomous driving features from its customers.. According to Tesla, which has not denied the veracity of said information, the leak originated from a disgruntled former employee who decided to exfiltrate the information. They have not responded to Handelsblatt’s request for information, but they did have tried to intimidate it by stating that it is illegal to publish such information. They have also spoken about their intentions to denounce said former worker. The issue of security and its users… that seems much less important for the company, wow.
The leak, which consists of around 100 gigabytes of documents (around 23,000), and which the outlet claims to have obtained from various informants, collects complaints received between 2015 and March 2022, mainly from the United States, but with some that have their origin in Europe and Asia. Within that period, Tesla received 2,400 reports of autoacceleration issues and 1,500 cases of braking function issues, 139 of which alerted to unintentional emergency braking and 383 to false collision warning phantom stops. The documentation, exhaustively analyzed by the German media, includes more than 1,000 accident reports and a table of 3,000 incidents in which drivers raised safety concerns about Tesla’s driving assistance system.
As a very revealing aspect of Tesla’s communication policy, the exfiltrated information also found documents with instructions for employees on how they should communicate with customers in this type of circumstance: no copying and pasting texts in emails, no sending call recordings by email, no text messages… in short, only verbal communications with customersa type of communication that, of course, is much more difficult to accredit after the fact if you have the need or interest in doing so.
