Cars collide bollards, brakes applied to avoid imaginary collisions, and more than 2,400 complaints about cars accelerating beyond the owner’s control. The 100 gigabytes of internal Tesla documents leaked to the German newspaper Handelsblatt paint a sobering picture of the technical limitations of the EV business.
The 23,000 files obtained by Handelsblatt cover issues in Europe, the US and Asia between 2015 and March 2022, and they appear to have serious flaws in Tesla’s Autopilot technology. The revelations could put the company under further pressure from regulators, who are likely to examine the reports for evidence that the company misled authorities or customers about the safety of its vehicles.
The leaks may also reinforce pervasive concerns among Tesla investors and analysts that the company has lost its way. The vaunted self-driving technology still doesn’t seem nearly safe enough for the road, and it doesn’t look like any viable new products can move from the drawing board to the showroom. Tesla hasn’t launched a new consumer car since 2020, and it’s widely seen as lagging behind other automakers, which are ramping up their development of new EVs to meet rising demand. Half-hidden in the flood of revelations is a teaser for a classified report on Tesla’s long-awaited “Cybertruck,” a strangely angular pickup truck announced in 2019. It is unlikely that this is good news.
“Tesla urgently needs a new credibility story,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research in Duisburg, Germany.
The contents of the leaked documents are shocking, with reports of near-death experiences at the hands of Tesla Autopilot. But analysts say it’s not unexpected.
“For most of us who have been following Tesla for a decade now, this isn’t too surprising, and it probably isn’t surprising for most Tesla customers,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent auto analyst based in Berlin.
Schmidt says Tesla has long taken a “move fast and break things” approach to product development, leading to concerns about whether the new releases are ready for the road. There are 393 recorded deaths with Teslas, 33 of them with Autopilot. Schmidt claims that Musk “accepts an executive’s death as a result of forwarding technology.” Musk did not respond to a request for comment on this story or on Schmidt’s claim.
It is often difficult to separate the Tesla brand from the character of the CEO. Musk has typically brushed off criticism of his products, often via Twitter, which he acquired for $44 billion last October. But the size of the German leaks could make it more difficult for Musk to sell his version of the story, according to Dudenhöffer.
“He has thousands of pieces of information, customer complaints, and at the same time he’s telling people that this is the best product in the world,” says Dudenhöffer, who likens the controversy to a scandal at Volkswagen in the mid-2010s, when it discovered that the automaker had downplayed the environmental impact of its vehicles.
Dudenhöffer blames Tesla’s mounting problems on Musk, who divides his time between running Tesla, his rocket company SpaceX and Twitter, which has been in permanent crisis since its acquisition last year. “He should no longer be the CEO and run Tesla,” says Dudenhöffer, “because he makes mistake after mistake after mistake.”
