Back in May, Lukasz Krupski leaked a massive amount of internal Tesla data to German newspaper, Handelsblatt. Now, he is raising alarm bells about the automaker’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), Autopilot, which he doesn’t believe is ready for public roads.
Tesla maintains that Autopilot, and its slightly more advanced counterpart, FSD, are safer than human drivers. However, autonomous experts have criticized the automaker for overselling the technology to the public, causing drivers to overestimate its abilities.
“I don’t think the hardware is ready and the software is ready,” Krupski told the BBC. “It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads. So even if you don’t have a Tesla, your children still walk in the footpath.”
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
Krupski's comments come days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on X that the automaker has "by far the best real-world AI." Meanwhile, the company claims that customers using Autopilot only had one crash where the airbag deployed per 5 million miles (8 million km) of driving, as compared to the one accident per 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) for users who do not use it.
Tesla has by far the best real-world AI https://t.co/At0EPNmKId
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2023
However, Krupski said that he found evidence of the company had not followed safety requirements to ensure that drivers were using its driver assistance systems safely. Indeed, the ease with which drivers can abuse Autopilot has been one of the primary criticisms leveled against Tesla.
Meanwhile, concerns about Tesla cars' ability to detect the world around them have arisen since the automaker made the controversial decision to use only cameras, rather than radar or LiDAR sensors. Krupski said that even the company's own employees have spoken to him about experiencing phantom braking incidents - which are the subject of an investigation by U.S. regulators.
Since releasing Tesla’s internal data, Autopilot isn’t the only thing that scares Krupski, though. He explained that being a whistleblower has been “terrifying,” and said, “I barely sleep at night sometimes.” However, his actions have earned him recognition. The former Tesla employee was recently awarded the Blueprint for Free Speech Whistleblowing Prize.
Source: BBC
