By now, everybody knows the two-pronged promise Tesla has been making for nearly a decade: The car company aims to revolutionize both cars’ relationship to the environment (through gas-free electric power) and consumers’ safety on the roads (through self-driving capabilities). Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long been fond of emphasizing that traffic deaths would decrease if driving weren’t in the all-too-human hands of, well, the driver — and has promised that one day, traveling by car will be like taking an elevator. “You’ll tell it where you want to go, and it takes you there with extreme levels of safety.”
The cars are certainly electric. That second objective, a new documentary argues, has proved more elusive.
Informed by the reporting of the New York Times’ Cade Metz and Neal Boudette, director Emma Schwartz’s “Elon Musk’s Crash Course” raises a skeptical eyebrow toward Tesla’s vaunted Autopilot feature, sometimes described as its self-driving software. It maintains that Autopilot hasn’t lived up to its promise and that lives have been endangered as a result. Here are three key arguments Schwartz’s film puts forth.
1. Despite Tesla’s claims that its technology would revolutionize cars for the safer, its cars have sometimes failed to recognize certain safety threats while in Autopilot mode — and Tesla drivers have had fatal road accidents while using it.
According to “Elon Musk’s Crash Course,” an investigation in 2016 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that some 38 Tesla crashes had taken place in the United States while the cars were in Autopilot mode, but the film details three in which drivers were killed.
The first is that of Josh Brown, a bomb dismantler for the U.S. Navy in the Iraq War and the founder of a company that aimed to extend Internet service into rural America. Described by his friends as a passionate tech enthusiast, Brown loved his Tesla and often filmed videos behind the wheel. When Musk retweeted one such video in April 2016, in which the car in Autopilot mode steered itself out of the way of a truck merging too aggressively, Brown was elated.
Brown was driving on the same mode through Williston, Fla., after leaving Disney World the following month when his Tesla drove under a tractor-trailer without slowing down. Brown, 40, was killed in the collision. (Despite rumors that Brown had been watching a movie, the documentary makes clear that no movies were found on Brown’s laptop. Still, NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, found that Brown was at fault because he was not paying attention to the road.) In the film, Musk is heard in an audio recording saying later that radar upgrades that
