A Tesla whistleblower has questioned Elon Musk’s full self-driving claims and reportedly shared 100GB of data with a German media outlet containing thousands of customer complaints about the automaker’s full self-driving (FSD) features.
In the documents available to Handelsblatt, around 2,400 self-acceleration problems and more than 1,500 braking problems in Tesla cars are described in detail.
According to The Verge, complaints about the Tesla FSD were filed in the US, Europe, and Asia between 2015 and March 2022.
According to Handelsblatt, there have been 383 instances of “phantom stops” resulting from misleading collision alerts and 139 reports of “unintentional emergency braking” from customers.
The media company claims that when Tesla was informed about the data it had obtained, it “demanded that the data be deleted and spoke of data theft.”
Customers have reported occurrences when their vehicle “suddenly brakes or accelerates abruptly.”
In some cases, Tesla drivers “ended up in a ditch, hit walls, or crashed into oncoming vehicles.”
Tesla’s FSD capability enables all of the features associated with Tesla’s Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot features, including automatic lane changes, automatic steering, automatic parking and more.
Despite several concerns, Tesla made its FSD beta available to everyone last November.
Tesla is under intense scrutiny for the FSD software’s autopilot and driver assistance features.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is also investigating Elon Musk’s claims about autonomous driving. The SEC investigation aims to determine whether the electric car maker broke its rules in promoting its FSD and Autopilot software.
To the relief of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, last month the jury returned its verdict in a 2019 Autopilot accident involving the electric car company.
The California state court jury did not award damages to plaintiff Justine Hsu, who sued Tesla in 2020.
In February, Tesla received an acquittal from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in a fatal accident involving a Tesla Model S autopilot system in 2021.