It was in January that Bloomberg revealed that the Tesla CEO dictated the disclaimer for Tesla’s infamous 2016 Autopilot video. The outlet had access to internal messages that showed Musk ordered the text to read like this: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” Nothing was further from the truth.
At the trial for the death of the engineer Wei “Walter” Huang, Ashok Elluswamy confirmed that the video was staged and that the ride was 3D-mapped. The director of the Autopilot program also said it did not represent the system’s capabilities at the time (or now, as a matter of fact).
Huang’s wife sued Tesla because she said the engineer believed the promises that the software would make his Model X autonomous, even if it could not be used as such for “legal reasons.” Huang died when his SUV on Navigate on Autopilot crashed. It was on March 23, 2018. So far, Tesla has been acquitted in all such cases thanks to the legal disclaimer that states the driver is responsible for what the vehicle does at all times. We’re yet to learn the verdict in Huang’s case.
These lawsuits have not stopped Tesla from calling its beta advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) Autopilot or Full Self-Driving. Jennifer Homendy called that “misleading and irresponsible” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) added that Tesla “has clearly misled numerous people to misuse and abuse technology.” Autopilot is involved with at least 19 deaths so far.
Despite these names, not a single autonomous vehicle is currently for sale. That does not stop Tesla customers from repeating nonstop that their cars can drive on their own. They can’t, and these folks often only learn that when there is nothing left to do. That said, it would not be the first time the battery electric vehicle (BEV) maker or its CEO would suggest or carelessly claim that its vehicles have a capability that they do not offer. The Cybertruck gave Tesla and Musk a new opportunity to do that, only with armoring this time. Like autonomous driving claims, this can put people at serious life threats.
I have already used the example of João Monteiro de Castro dos Santos, and it is sadly very educational when it comes to real bulletproof stuff. In 2004, the Rio de Janeiro city councilman crossed a road where drug dealers armed with assault rifles were forcing drivers to stop. The criminals wanted to rob them. Santos told his driver not to comply because he believed his armored Honda Civic would resist any shots. His car would have needed a B6+/A9 level armor to protect him from the riffle bullets that invaded the cabin as if it were a regular vehicle. The councilman died. The case with the Tesla Cybertruck can be even worse.
The electric pickup truck is not armored by any means. The fact that its thick stainless steel panels can resist Tommy gunshots is more of an engineering mistake than any valuable advantage. It made the Cybertruck heavier than it should be. Originally, the idea was to create a stressed-skin vehicle. Incapable of putting that idea to work, Tesla made a unibody truck that is just less efficient, more expensive, and much more difficult to produce than it should be. Above all, these thick panels provide no safety to occupants, especially if the shots hit vulnerable areas such as the columns or the windows. The overreliance induced by a false safety feeling is the real danger here – just like it is with people who think they have an autonomous Tesla.
None of that prevented the company from putting a Cybertruck prototype with several shot damages to drive around California. The vehicle was filmed at night. When the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley shared the video on October 20 on the social media that Musk was forced to buy, the company CEO replied this: “We emptied the entire drum magazine of a Tommy gun into the driver door Al Capone style. No bullets penetrated into the passenger compartment.” The bold is on me. A Tommy gun is a Thompson submachine gun, which uses .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) caliber bullets.
Eventually, someone took pictures of that vehicle in the morning, and Tesla East Bay Fremont and Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley shared them on the same social media. An Elon Musk parody profile eventually photoshopped one of those images of the battered truck into another photograph. It originally showed the Tesla CEO in a shooting session that happened on September 30. Musk was hip-firing his Barrett 82A1 riffle that day. The edited picture made it look like the Cybertruck was the main target in that demonstration. Using a famous Sheldon Cooper sentence and modifying it a bit, “it was funny because it was credible.” I confess I almost took it for the real deal. Now, that image will help me illustrate my point.
Musk must have ordered or at least authorized this stupid test – even if I can’t fathom why any serious engineer would wish to unload a machine gun on an unarmored prototype – rage issues, perhaps? Instead of scrapping the vehicle or keeping it away from the public’s eyes, the Tesla CEO must have ordered it to perform more tests on open roads. At the very least, he did not prevent them. When his followers took the bait, Musk didn’t correct them about what the truck could really do. The CEO actually reinforced the mistaken perception that this vehicle is armored by stating that “no bullets penetrated into the passenger compartment.” His legal team is probably preparing a disclaimer right now to say the Cybertruck is not armored and that people who get shot while believing that this was the case did so on their own accord. In other words, they are to blame for their dumb decisions, as are those who think Autopilot autopilots or Full Self-Driving full self-drives.
As my colleague Vlad Mitrache recently wrote, it seems that Tesla and Musk never learn or just never care. The BEV maker had shared a video of FSD working with a driver who did not put his hands on the steering yoke for the whole 5-minute drive. Tesla so far managed to escape accusations of misleading customers about the autonomous capabilities of its vehicles by stating it urges them always to have their hands on the steering wheel. Sharing a video in which a Tesla engineer avoids that is shameless and hypocritical. It fully exposes a two-faced communication: one for authorities and another for customers. Buyers who eventually have issues will meet the face meant for authorities. It is the one Tesla wears to dodge responsibility.
Shooting a Cybertruck to show it is bulletproof is useless and dangerous. Putting the gunshot-molded prototype to show off on public roads is temerarious. Allowing gullible people to repeat that it is made to resist gunshots without correcting them is unclassifiable. It is possibly Musk’s desperate attempt to save the vehicle with which he and his team “dug our own grave,” in his own words. Maybe that’s why it looks like a coffin. Let’s just hope these eerie references are something customers will never relate to. Believing their vehicles may do something they can’t will inevitably lead that way, whether with autonomy or armoring. In a stock Tesla, they are both fairy tales.
