Your Tesla wants to murder you!
Different names, same old news. The media has been deceptively blaming our cars for all kinds of allegedly-dangerous defects for a century.
The media loves to terrify us about our cars. And it’s not just today, or this year, or even this decade. The practice goes back for as long as there have been cars.
Today, the favorite whipping boy is Tesla. They’re weird and scary and unfamiliar — so they are the perfect candidate for sensationalism-minded editors. Tesla is the only brand of car that is almost always mentioned in any news story involving a vehicular mishap; the mere mention of the brand is enough to raise alarm, even though in most cases the fact that it was a Tesla has nothing whatsoever to do with what happened.
Case in point: A woman is currently suing Tesla for $1 million after crashing her Cybertruck, falsely claiming that it was being controlled by Tesla’s Full Self Driving mode. The video is above. The car’s data logs, provided to the court as discovery for the trial (and also tweeted to the public by Elon Musk) show that she had disengaged FSD four seconds before the crash — in the video, that’s about a second before the car passes under the overhead sign. As you can see, she had more than enough time to slow, stop, or even simply steer around the corner. She didn’t, probably because she was texting or otherwise not paying attention.
Her lawyers are now claiming that she was desperately trying to disengage FSD because she saw the car was going to crash itself, but by then it was too late. This is plainly false; four seconds before the crash you can see that everything was perfectly fine. Disengaging FSD is instantaneous if you touch the brake pedal or jerk the steering wheel; if she had truly thought it was about to crash, we’d hope she’d have had the presence of mind to brake. That data is also in the logs, but has not been publicly reported yet (that I’ve seen).
Note that the reporters credulously parrot the driver’s false claims without any hint of either skepticism or impartiality. They are clearly fanning the flames of public paranoia, for clicks and views.
Let’s look at five other times the media has tried to make us terrified by our cars — using dishonesty that’s at a whole other level.
