Tesla Critics Use Drones, Crowdsourced Investigations to Monitor Company

Elon Musk of Tesla confused
Getty/Peter Parks

Tesla critics have launched a website recently which is designed to showcase drone photos and crowdsourced investigations to keep track of Elon Musk’s company and factory activity levels.

CNBC reports that a group of Tesla critics and short sellers — those who bet against Tesla’s stock increasing in value — have launched a new website recently which uses aerial photographs of Tesla factories captured using drones to assess the company’s production output and manufacturing processes. The new website, called TslaQ.org, features aerial drone photography of Tesla facilities captured by the “Shorty Air Force;” a group of anonymous Tesla critics that became popular on social media for their ability to gain information on Tesla via photographs of the company’s production facilities.

The “Shorty Ground Force” does similar work, but takes their photos at ground level mainly using smartphones. The photos are analyzed by the critics who often point out the number of cars left sitting in Tesla’s vehicle production lot or note differences between Tesla’s claims and what is observable at the company’s factories.

All photos and videos on the website are available under the creative commons license; this means that websites and publications are free to use photos from the site such as the one below, which shows the Tesla facility in Lathrop, California.

Following Tesla’s poor fourth quarter and an important financial year ahead in 2019, the website is likely to annoy Tesla and the company’s CEO Elon Musk who appears to take criticism very personally. This was seen most notably when he referred to the British cave rescuer Vern Unsworth as a “pedo guy;” but aside from that incident Musk has a history of attacking those skeptical of his plans, as Breitbart News outlined in this article.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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