Elon Musk's Image Takes a Hit in 'New York Times Presents' Doc
Elon Musk has a vision for a future of autonomous vehicles. A new 'New York Times Presents' doc questions the cost of getting there.
Tech executives often take pride in being “disruptors,” and there’s no figure in the industry more disruptive than Elon Musk. After founding the company that became PayPal, he turned Tesla Motors into one of the most beloved brands in the automotive industry, in no small part thanks to his vehicle’s amazing technology, including its self-driving “Autopilot” feature. But according to a new documentary from the New York Times, that technology may not be as safe as Musk has claimed.
Elon Musk’s Crash Course—premiering Friday, May 10 at 10pm ET on FX— is the latest documentary from The New York Times Presents, which also broke open the Britney Spears conservatorship. It paints an unflattering portrait of the multibillionaire, at least with respect to his company’s response to a series of fatal accidents involving the Autopilot feature. Using interviews with former Tesla employees, including some who worked directly on Autopilot, the new documentary explores the gap between Musk’s ability to inspire and the compromises he’s made in service of this vision. Beyond the climate impact of electric vehicles, a feasible self-driving function could potentially save tens of thousands of lives lost each year to traffic accidents.
“He would say really cool things, science fiction things, and he would make you believe that you could do it,” JT Stukes, a former Tesla project engineer, says in the documentary. The problem is, the limitations of technology are treated as an annoying impediment to the future rather than practical problems to be solved (we’re seeing a bit of this impetuousness in his acquisition of Twitter).
So when 40-year-old Josh Brown was killed in 2016 after his Tesla failed to recognize a semi-truck crossing in front of its path, the tragedy did little to halt the momentum of the project. In fact, Tesla was able to spin the report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into a positive, touting the comparative safety of the technology while eliding the company’s own claim that drivers should always keep both hands on the wheel when in Autopilot. As former Tesla software engineer Raven Jiang, says, "Sometimes it seems like people and companies were being rewarded, not for telling the truth, but in fact, for doing a bit of the opposite.”
The documentary features multiple examples of this, from a staged promo video touting Autopilot’s capabilities to Musk’s perennial speculations that the technology is only a year or two away from full functionality. By the end of the film, one gets the impression that Elon isn’t duplicitous so much as self-serving, perhaps a little too comfortable with the notion that eggs must be broken in service of the omlet. Musk’s vision of a future full of energy-efficient, automated cars may come to fruition, but as Crash Course makes clear, we may still have to reckon with the costs of arriving there.
The New York Times Presents: Elon Musk’s Crash Course premieres Friday, May 20 at 10pm ET on FX. Use the link below to subscribe to Sling Blue with FX.