Tesla whistleblower calls cars with Autopilot “experiments in public roads”

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A former Tesla employee who leaked thousands of accident reports and other documents expressed his doubts about the safety of Tesla's Autopilot system in an interview with the BBC published today.

"I don't think the hardware is ready and the software is ready," ex-Tesla employee Lukasz Krupski said. "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."

The nonprofit group Blueprint for Free Speech recently awarded Krupski with its Whistleblowing Prize. "In late 2021, Lukasz realised that—even as a service technician—he had access to a shockingly wide range of internal data at Tesla," the group's prize announcement said. "Not only did access controls seem almost entirely absent, other lapses were evident in the data Lukasz was seeing: serious lapses that risked putting Tesla's customers, and those sharing the roads with them, in danger." Those safety risks included sudden accelerations and braking.