The Tesla Way: When Your Product Fails, Blame The Customer?

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If something goes wrong, first look to blame your customer. That appears to be the latest nugget of intergalactic wisdom from Elon Musk

Photo: AP photo/Paul Sakuma

Tesla Motors issued a statement late Wednesday that it was withdrawing from a National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the March crash that killed Walter Huang near Mountain View, Calif.

The company also publicly blamed Huang for the crash and made a series of statements about the accident that drew criticism from the NTSB.

As any automaker can tell you, there are hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries that happen in vehicles driven under the influence of alcohol, other drugs or at reckless speeds. Sometimes that leads to a settlement. Sometimes not.

“When I was at NHTSA (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) and dealing with Tesla, they always started from this perspective that the agencies that are required by law to protect the public should not have authority over them,” said David Friedman, director of Consumers Union’s car safety policy analysis. “As far as I know there is no Tesla exemption.”

In its statement, Tesla said that the NTSB was requiring that the company not release any information about Autopilot for more than a year, a provision Tesla called unacceptable.

“Even though we won’t be a formal party, we will continue to provide technical assistance to the NTSB,” the statement said.

But NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt told Musk that Tesla was being removed as a party, at least partly because it blamed the victim, Bloomberg reported.

Whether Tesla withdrew or was removed from the case, the NTSB won’t be obligated to share its findings with Tesla before releasing them to the public. Musk’s only public relations tool will be his Twitter account.

The NTSB confirmed earlier this week two other pending investigations of other Tesla crashes, including a probe of an August 2017 Tesla battery fire in Lake Forest, Calif., that occurred after an owner lost control and ran into his garage.

In May 2016, Josh Brown died in Florida when his Tesla Model S collided with a truck while the Autopilot system was engaged.

While the NTSB found that Brown caused the accident because he failed to keep his hands on the steering wheel, the board later amended the finding to say that Tesla bears some of the blame for selling a system that allowed fatal misuse.

What Tesla doesn’t seem to grasp is that explaining in a manual that a driver should never disengage from a semi-autonomous system simply isn’t enough. Especially when you’re calling it “Autopilot” and touting it as a the leading technology on the market.

As my fellow Forbes contributor Sam Abuelsamid tells me, Tesla has done its customers a disservice by claiming that Autopilot eventually will have full self-driving capability.

“Tesla needs to stop putting beta software for active safety systems into the hands of paying customers on public roads,” said Abuelsamid, who's a senior analyst with Navigant Research. “At best, the idea that Tesla customers have provided informed consent to participate in a public testing program is dubious. I don’t believe most of these customers are truly informed about what they are getting and testing.”

Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies in Rehoboth, Mass., said Tesla has overstated Autopilot’s capabilities.

“You’ve got a company that is constantly looking to blame everybody else,” Kane said. “Technologies that are not fully autonomous should not be portrayed as such.”

Another illusion that Tesla has peddled is that all maintenance fixes and technology upgrades can be achieved through over-the-air software patches.

Even expensive luxury electric cars get old.

Last month, a couple days after Huang was killed, Tesla announced it would recall 123,000 Model S cars produced before April 2016 to replace power steering bolts that could experience “excessive corrosion” in cold-weather climates where state and local governments use road salt.

Just like a certain mercurial politician who has seen hundreds of aging tweets come back to haunt him, Musk tweeted way back in 2014, “The word ‘recall’ needs to be recalled."

Greg Gardner, Contributor

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