Elon Musk’s Big German Trouble. Does the Tesla leak break out?
The main German business newspaper has in its hands gigabytes of data from the US House from which emerge thousands of complaints about phantom braking, false warnings and technical problems from customers. A real Tesla leak at the base of the article entitled "My autopilot almost killed me"
Once again a journalistic dossier embarrasses Tesla. But such large and full-bodied ones had not yet been seen, so much so that we could define it as a real Tesla leak. Only a few weeks ago Reuters , interviewing some former employees of the company led by Elon Musk , brought to light the content of some internal chats in which the technicians working on the electric car kept the videos taken by the cameras mounted on the cars to mock the owners. surveying the most “original” films.
THE DOSSIERS THAT EMBARRISE MUSK
Thus frames were collected that immortalized people in embarrassing circumstances, for example completely naked. Or less funny videos of road accidents, including that of a child on a bicycle hit by a car: the footage, reported Reuters , has gone particularly viral inside the Tesla headquarters in San Mateo in California.
In court, again recently, however, it emerged that the famous 2016 promotional video in which a Tesla Model X appears which, from home, drives autonomously, along a fairly articulated route, to the workplace, "delivers" the passenger , after which he leaves again to look for a parking space, always in total autonomy, it was false . In short, the Texan manufacturer does not yet have the technology in hand to make all this a reality, let alone in 2016.
The head of the Autopilot division, Ashok Elluswamy , had had to admit it in the sworn deposition. The manager revealed not only that the footage was the result of a skilful editing resulting from different shooting sessions, but also of a software that had elaborated that specific path, with special 3D maps. Not secondary detail, filming was also interrupted by a Model X that crashed into a fence.
THE GERMAN TESLA LEAK
However, all this seems to fade in the face of Tesla's latest grain. Handelsblatt , the most authoritative German publication when it comes to industry and finance, has come into possession of over 20,000 Tesla confidential files (100 gigabytes of material), from which thousands of complaints emerge from customers, all referable to malfunctions of the Autopilot, with reports of phantom braking, false warnings, technical problems of various kinds.
The newspaper, which thanks to a deep gorge has a considerable amount of data in its hands, has summed up the material viewed with the title: Mein Autopilot hat mich fast umgebracht (translated means: "My autopilot almost killed me"), which allows us to clearly understand the significance of those complaints viewed by the Handelsblatt editorial staff.
WHAT EMERGES FROM THE STOLEN DATA
To be precise, the Tesla leak brought to light 2,400 complaints about sudden accelerations, more than 1,500 braking problems (including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking) and 383 phantom braking (with stops) linked to false collision warnings .
The newspaper examined more than 3,000 items concerning user concerns with reference to safety, even after an accident. And precisely on the claims, most of which took place in the United States, but obviously the magazine highlighted the many German cases. Others come from Asia.
Another aspect that could embarrass the House discovered by the economic newspaper is that Tesla would have avoided communicating in written form with the customers involved in the malfunctions, preferring as often as possible an "only verbal" exchange of information.
Finally, Handesblatt also underlines a privacy issue: those files include more than 100,000 names of employees, many of whom have left Tesla in the meantime, private email addresses, telephone numbers, salaries and even bank details.
Among the data that came to light, also the social security number of the CEO, Elon Musk. It is legitimate to wonder if the Group could have all this data, it certainly emerges that it did not keep them correctly, but it is much more interesting to ask who delivered such a "treasure" of information to the press. And why.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/il-grosso-guaio-tedesco-di-elon-musk-scoppia-il-tesla-leak/ on Tue, 30 May 2023 13:02:19 +0000.