Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently claimed that no other CEO cares as much about safety as he does — despite Tesla’s long history of dangerous workplace accidents, questionable autopilot systems, and cars that can explode when they crash.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Elon Musk claimed that no other CEO cares about safety as much as him. “I don’t think there’s a CEO on this planet that cares more about safety than me,” Musk said discussing the safety of his vehicle’s “autopilot” systems.
tesla crash in Moscow (mr.medvedev/YouTube)
Elon Musk of Tesla (Getty/Peter Parks)
Musk, who was recently named person of the year by TIME Magazine, was asked about the controversy surrounding his company’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems in its vehicles and the safety concerns around it. Tesla’s FSD systems are still in beta stages and have been involved in numerous accidents, in August of 2021 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched an investigation into the Autopilot feature. 750,000 Tesla vehicles were included in the investigation.
Musk told the Financial Times that he never misled his customers about the capabilities of Autopilot or FSD. Musk said during the interview: “Read what it says when you order a Tesla. Read what it says when you turn it on. It’s very, very clear.”
While Musk is correct that Tesla vehicles do have a number of warnings related to the FSD system, the Tesla website itself does not imply that Autopilot or FSD is in beta and cannot be fully relied upon yet. A promotional video on the website even claims that the person in the driver’s seat is only for legal reasons and a driver doesn’t even need to have their hands on the steering wheel, which is supposedly a requirement for enabling Autopilot.
The limitations of the system are only found on the support page for the Autopilot feature and aren’t even linked or mentioned in the promotional page for Autopilot. Musk himself has also been accused of misrepresenting the capabilities of the system.
Breitbart News previously reported:
Mary Cummings, a professor at Duke who studies the interaction between humans and autonomous driving systems, commented on Musk’s claims that Tesla cars will be able to operate autonomously on highways saying “He’s wrong, but it’s his job to sell cars.”
Sam Abuelsamid, a senior research analyst for Navigant, called Musk’s comments “reckless” and believes that they could put the lives of Tesla drivers at risk: “Nothing has changed for Elon,” he said. “He remains as reckless as he’s ever been with regard to the way he talks about Autopilot and its capabilities.”
Abuelsamid continued to say: “When somebody like Elon Musk tells his customers that, hey, this is full self-driving now, when it is absolutely not, I think that he is actually putting his customers at risk, because you have to take into account the reality of human behavior with these kinds of systems, and Tesla is not doing that.”
In 2019, Musk was criticized for sharing a tweet of a Tesla driver disregarding the company’s own safety instructions by driving a Tesla vehicle with his hands completely off the wheel. Breitbart News reported:
One driver decided instead to sit with his hands off of the steering wheel of the vehicle as it continued to drive, making a video of the experience. These reckless actions are explicitly prohibited by Tesla, which even has a notification on the vehicle’s dashboard instructing the driver to keep both hands on the wheel while in autopilot mode — instructions obviously disregarded by the vehicle owner as can be seen in the video below:
Im amazed. My car drove me practically all the way home, with no input from me, changing lanes, merging on and off of 3 highways, in rush hour, in the rain, in NYC traffic!!! Stunned. @Tesla @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/HC7mql5wYl
— Dr. Camilo Ortiz 👨🏼🎓 (@DrCamiloOrtiz) April 6, 2019
But rather than noting that this dangerous behavior is not approved by Tesla, the company’s CEO Elon Musk shared this video on Twitter as an example of the vehicle’s advanced self-driving capabilities:
The Tesla Full Self-Driving Computer now in production is at about 5% compute load for these tasks or 10% with full fail-over redundancy https://t.co/fTseO2JyVp
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 8, 2019
This isn’t the first time Musk has blatantly disregarded his own company’s safety advice, even taking his hands off the wheel himself during a demonstration of the “autopilot” feature.
Read more at the Financial Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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