Tesla has been puffing its chest about the autonomous driving features of its vehicles for years. And yes, it is true that during the first years they were a reference in this regard, and that it also served as an impetus for other companies, both veterans of the industry and others from the new creation and also some from the technology sector, decided to devote part of their efforts to contribute to the development of this technology, which is called upon to significantly change the mobility paradigm.

The problem, as with virtually everything Elon Musk-related, is that fact and fiction, truth and lie, intermingle like meat and fat in Kobe beef, which makes it very difficult to segregate one part from the other. In the case of the ox, it is of course something very positive, but if we are talking about the communication of the car 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, because in 2016 he said that Tesla would reach this level in 2018. However, the statement of the engineer most responsible for these functions in the company served to deny Musk’s promise again. Well, time has also served this purpose, as we are in May 2023, Tesla is still at Level 2, while Germany’s Mercedes already has several authorizations on both sides of the Atlantic to activate Level 3.

Tesla’s autonomous driving features, 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 conduct investigations in this regard. Some of the problems that are born, as we’ve said many times before, by selling smoke and lies to gullible customers who, good god, when they read that there’s a feature called Full Self-Driving, think they’re really going to find a car capable of driving itself .

However, it seems that what we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. According to an investigation by German media outlet Handelsblatt, which had access to leaked company documents, Tesla has received thousands of safety complaints from its customers about its autonomous driving features.. According to Tesla, which did not deny the veracity of the information, the leak came from a disgruntled former employee who decided to exfiltrate the information. They did not respond to Handelsblatt’s request for information, but they did tried to intimidate her by saying it was illegal to release such information. They also spoke of their intentions to convict said former worker. The issue of security and its users… that seems much less important to 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, compiles complaints received between 2015 and March 2022, mainly from the United States, but some have their origins. in Europe and Asia. In this period Tesla received 2,400 reports of auto-acceleration problems and 1,500 cases of braking problems, of which 139 alerted to inadvertent emergency braking and 383 to false phantom stop collision warnings. The documentation, thoroughly analyzed by the German media, contains more than 1,000 accident reports and a table of 3,000 incidents in which drivers raised safety concerns about Tesla’s driver assistance system.

In a very revealing aspect of Tesla’s communications policy, the leaked information also found documents instructing employees on how they should communicate with customers in these types of circumstances: no copying and pasting text into emails, no emailing recordings of calls, no text news news… in short only verbal communication with customersa type of communication that is obviously much more difficult to accredit if you have a need or interest in it.