Crime: Das Tesla-Experiment mit dem autonomen Fahren
Nichts ist so wichtig für Tesla wie das Meistern des autonomen Fahrens, sagt Elon Musk. Eine neue Dokumentation zeigt, wie weit der Konzern davon weg ist – und wer dafür zahlt.
In April 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk boasted that the company's Autopilot system was roughly twice as safe as a human driver. Three days later, a Tesla Model S equipped with Autopilot careened through an intersection in Key Largo, Florida, claiming the life of 22-year-old Naiel Benavides. By August 2025, a Miami jury had handed Tesla a $243 million verdict in one of several cases detailed in the documentary "Elon Musk Uncovered – The Tesla Experiment" by Andreas Pichler.
The source of this information was the Tesla Files, a collection of around 100 gigabytes of internal data leaked by a whistleblower at the end of 2022 to the Handelsblatt newspaper. This trove included thousands of customer complaints about sudden acceleration, phantom braking, and other issues with the Autopilot system.
Robotics professor Missy Cummings, who has consulted with the US transportation authority, warns that a hallucination at high speed can be fatal. In a segment of the "Handelsblatt Crime" series, investigative reporter Sönke Iwersen and host Ina Karabasz discuss the film and the state of Tesla's promises. In April 2026, the Dutch safety authority RDW approved Full Self-Driving on European roads for the first time, despite the fact that the software is not compatible with around four million older Teslas, despite the promises made to their customers.
Additionally, there is news from Grünheide, where employees are training a humanoid robot named Optimus using camera backpacks.
Written by urgent.news from Handelsblatt's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
