On May 26th, a Tesla whistleblower leaked 100GB of data to the German newspaper “Handelsblatt”, which included thousands of customer complaints. These complaints have raised serious concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature.
These data are said to come from Tesla’s IT system and cover complaints reported by Tesla owners in the US, Europe, and Asia, spanning from 2015 to March 2022. According to Handelsblatt, during this period, Tesla owners reported more than 2400 cases of unintended acceleration and over 1500 cases of braking issues, including 139 reports of “unintended emergency braking” and 383 reports of “phantom braking” caused by false collision warnings.
Some of the complaints mentioned by Handelsblatt include descriptions of how the car “suddenly brakes or suddenly accelerates”. The report states that while some owners were able to control the vehicle safely, others “drove into ditches, hit walls, or collided with oncoming vehicles.”
The documents obtained by Handelsblatt also outline Tesla’s policy in responding to customer issues, indicating that Tesla prefers to keep its vehicle data confidential. Here are some of the policies described by Handelsblatt:
・For each event, Tesla sets “technical review” points. Employees who regularly input this review into the system explicitly state that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also includes bold annotations stating that information (if any) can only be “verbally communicated to the customer”.
・Tesla’s policy states: “Do not copy and paste the following report into an email, text, or voicemail to send to the customer.” Vehicle data may not be released to the public without permission. If “lawyers cannot be prevented from intervening”, it must be documented.
Tesla requests data deletion
According to a statement by Handelsblatt Chief Editor Sebastian Matthes, the editorial team of the newspaper has asked Tesla several questions regarding the data they received from whistleblowers.
According to Mattis, Tesla did not answer their questions, but “requested the deletion of data and talked about data theft.” It is still unclear who provided the leaked information to Handelsblatt, but Mattis pointed out that the newspaper obtained this information from “several sources.”
This is not the first time that concerns have been raised about Tesla’s FSD. Tesla’s FSD feature supports all functions of Tesla’s Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot, including automatic lane changing, automatic steering, and automatic parking. Despite these concerns, Tesla provided a FSD beta to everyone in November last year.
In January of this year, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he would provide users with an option to turn off the “steering wheel reminder” for FSD, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began investigating Tesla’s FSD system. About a month later, the agency found collision risks with the feature, leading Tesla to recall 362,758 vehicles equipped with FSD and suspend FSD installation.
