A whistleblower violates the data privacy of Tesla customers, employees and business partners and brings the thorn in the side of the American electric car manufacturer back into the spotlight: its assisted driving system. The data leak, 100 gigabytes, took place in Germany and was revealed by the Handelsblatt newspaper. «My Autopilot almost killed me», is one of the customers’ sentences. The company has spoken of theft and a lawsuit against the suspected former employee.
The so-called Autopilot – it is called that but it is a more ordinary level 2 of assisted driving – and its more expensive version, the Full self-driving (optional from 6 thousand and 15 thousand dollars), have been under fire for some time by the authorities in the United States . A trial closed in California at the end of April actually proved the manufacturer right in a 2019 case: the owner lost mainly because she used assisted driving in the city, which Tesla invites you not to do.
But the Autopilot and the FSD are under investigation by the US Department of Justice (since February) and recently the Secretary of Transportation has been very strict: according to Pete Buttigieg, the Austin company shouldn’t use the term Autopilot because its cars they cannot drive themselves.
Open debate since 2016
Yet in recent weeks the CEO, Elon Musk, has relaunched: the next Tesla will work “almost entirely in autonomous mode”. The bet is to keep the hype up. At the end of April Li Yunfei, spokesman for BYD, now Tesla’s number one rival, did not mince words when she explained: “We think that autonomous driving technology completely independent of humans is very, very far away and practically impossible”. . For the risk of accidents, above all.
The Autopilot controversy has actually been going on since 2016, when Tesla produced a video of a Model X that the Autopilot program director later claimed was fake. All this does not seem to have weighed on the success of the Austin company. «The purchase of cars like the Tesla – comments Gianluca Di Loreto, partner of Bain & Company responsible for the Automotive practice in Italy – is not rational. It is not the car with which I have to make the commute from home to work. It’s an iconic purchase. In addition to having a clear conscience, because the car has no emissions, the customer feels cool because he has a product that many others don’t have. It is not comparable to having a Ferrari but it is only beautiful because it is Tesla. How it works matters up to a certain point. And that the product keeps all its promises is a detail that comes later».