Elon Musk is happy for prospective Tesla customers, sell-side analysts, buy-side investors and his Twitter followers to believe that Tesla vehicles are fully autonomous when that could not be further from the truth (see our earlier article regarding Autonomous vehicle permits).
This fallacy helps promote the narrative around Musk as a genius entrepreneur (newsflash: Musk is not a Tesla co-founder), as well as potentially inflating Tesla already rich equity valuation. The deaths reported by the Wall Street Journal are not the first whereby Tesla passengers died because nobody was actively driving the vehicle, incorrectly believing that Tesla’s driver assist technology – Autopilot – was fully autonomous and therefore in full control of the vehicle. Shame on Mr. Musk and Tesla’s weak Board of Directors for allowing this fallacy to persist. Click HERE for the Wall Street Journal article.