Tesla CEO Elon Musk always seems to be at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist. He and his electric car company have made dozens of headlines in 2023, most of them overwhelmingly negative. Sit back and let John Oliver from HBO’s Last Week Tonight take you on a rollercoaster of Musk news from the past year and remind yourself why you should never buy a Tesla or believe anything this guy says.
In January an engineer from Tesla testified saying the 2016 video the company claimed to show a “full self-driving” car was actually staged. The system is currently in its beta form and available to over 50,000 Tesla owners, despite all of the obvious safety reasons why it shouldn’t be. As Oliver shows using video from CNBC, the full self-driving system is far from perfect, making dangerous and oftentimes incorrect maneuvers while surrounded by traffic and pedestrians. Just last week Tesla was forced to recall over 2 million cars to prevent drivers from abusing their vehicle’s “autosteer” function.
There have been about 40 fatal or serious crashes involving Tesla’s driver assistance software since 2016, according to The Washington Post. One assumes that’d be enough to convince Musk to take the systems off the market and continue testing internally to avoid more harm. Yet, as Oliver points out, Tesla says it is “morally indefensible” not to make its systems widely available to the public, citing “incontrovertible data” that it saves lives and prevents injury… without producing that data for the public to see.
Oliver talks about more than just Tesla, of course. He also covers Musk’s disastrous Twitter acquisition, his SpaceX stumbles, and much, much more. It’s worth a watch, especially if you’re on the fence about that Cybertruck you’ve been waiting three years for.
