The Musk-ousted Tesla co-founder calls autonomous driving “far too immature” for the road
If someone says “Mr. Tesla” is obviously Elon Musk these days. But eventually the nickname went to Martin Eberhard, who co-founded the electric vehicle manufacturer in 2003. Eberhard ran Tesla Motors as CEO before Musk ousted him in 2007.
Eberhard isn’t a big believer in autonomous driving — and he worries about Musk’s focus on it. In an interview published today by Insider, he hinted that it could be dangerous.
On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that Tesla will recall more than 360,000 vehicles equipped with its Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta software because of apparent crash risks. (Musk has problems with the word “recall” because the necessary fixes will be performed via an over-the-air software update rather than at service centers.)
Eberhard remarked about Tesla’s early days: “All this autonomous FSD autopilot crap – none of it existed when I was there. We were still busy getting the car running and we didn’t think about it at all. That came later. That requires a much, much bigger budget than we had.”
Musk prioritized it. Last summer, in an interview with the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley YouTube channel, he said that achieving autonomous driving technology is the “difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.”
Musk said FSD mode is key to making Teslas compelling enough for the automaker to challenge established automakers.
Eberhard has other thoughts. “I think we need to break the habit of thinking of all this autonomous stuff as connected to electric vehicles,” he told Insider. He said he appreciates “safety-centric systems” like the driver-assistance features that current Teslas are equipped with.
It’s the autonomous driving that bothers him. The FSD feature requires drivers to monitor it, but it allows Teslas to park automatically, drive on freeways, change lanes, and stop at traffic lights.
“I think the technology is far too immature to put it on the road,” said Eberhard. “I mean, that’s my cautious nature, but I would have had a really hard time putting software on the road that’s so buggy.”
Eberhard is not alone. Last weekend, tech CEO Dan O’Dowd spent almost $600,000 on a Super Bowl ad warning Americans about Tesla’s FSD feature. He tweeted“I’m trying to remove the worst, most incompetently designed, developed and tested automotive product on the market.”
Tesla threatened legal action against O’Dowd and his group The Dawn Project last August after they released a viral video that showed a Tesla allegedly in FSD mode hitting a child-sized mannequin. In a cease and desist letter to O’Dowd, Tesla called the Dawn project’s testing “seriously misleading and likely fraudulent.”
Tesla has faced lawsuits and regulatory investigations over its autonomous driving capability. And last month, reports surfaced that a company engineer said a video demo of Tesla’s 2016 FSD mode had been staged.
wealth contacted Tesla but did not receive an immediate response.
Eberhard said that in his opinion it is a mistake to think of a car as a software platform.
“I have an iPhone and every time I get a software update there are bugs in it,” he told Insider. “For example, these errors cause my Newsfeed app to crash occasionally. It’s not a big deal as it’s just an annoyance on the iPhone. But an error like that appears in the software that controls my brakes or the steering, for example, and it can kill you.”
Learn how to navigate and build trust in your organization with The Trust Factor, a weekly newsletter exploring what leaders need to succeed. Login here.
