Documentary warns of self-driving Teslas
“Elon Musk’s Crash Course”: Documentary. (Not rated. 74 minutes.) Airs 10 p.m. Friday, May 20, on FX and Hulu.
“Elon Musk’s Crash Course,” which kicks off the second season of the “New York Times Presents” series on FX and Hulu on Friday, May 20, is a 74-minute documentary that makes the case for never getting inside a Tesla — at least not one in which the car itself is doing the driving.
Twice over the course of the film, Tesla owner Elon Musk appears onscreen describing his dream: Someday, you’ll be able to get in your car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination. Meanwhile, the documentary suggests that you can do that right now — so long as your destination is the afterlife.
We have been hearing for almost a decade that fully automated cars are imminent, but the technology has proved a lot more difficult and elusive. Government officials and former Tesla employees go into the details, saying, among other things, that Musk is too wedded to the use of cameras to gauge surroundings, and that Tesla is too sparing with those cameras. The film asserts that a combination of multiple cameras plus lidar (like radar, but involving light waves) would be the most likely features of a safe driverless car.
Musk did not agree to be interviewed for the documentary, but as one of the least camera-shy tycoons of the modern age, his face and voice are all over the film. He’s an interesting man with a manner that’s hard to read. Some might say he seems incapable of human feeling, but that sort of observation would be a cliche.
Rather, Musk seems as if he is perfectly capable of human feelings, but chooses not to have them.
“Elon Musk’s Crash Course” goes into the story of Joshua Brown, a man who loved risk and enjoyed being on the cutting edge of technology. He was driving a Tesla; the Autopilot malfunctioned, and he died in a horrific crash. Years later, necessary improvements have yet to be made and others have died under similar circumstances.
With Musk choosing not to defend himself directly, there really is no one here to speak on his behalf. For example, one thing someone might say is that any adoption of a new technology results in fatalities — at the turn of the last century, people were accidentally electrocuting themselves with alternating current. Though Brown’s grief-stricken friends are disgusted with Tesla, his family, which also chose not to appear in the film, is much more sympathetic to Musk and Tesla and believes that self-driving cars will ultimately result in fewer fatalities, according to a statement read at Brown’s funeral.
Still, two takeaways seem undeniable. The first is that Musk has overhyped the technology and presented aspiration as accomplished fact. This seems to be the way of Silicon Valley; this is simply how it’s done. And it only becomes actual fraud if you take the practice as far as convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes did. In any case, the public’s rule of thumb, in response, should be to take anything any company CEO says with a pound of salt.
The second is that a whole happy world of self-driving cars is a long way off. If you want to go carousing with friends, one of you is still going to take one for the team and become the designated driver — probably at least until the 2030s.