Ex-Tesla Employee Slams Autopilot, Says Company Neglected Safety Requirements

Widespread phantom braking and allegations that Tesla is not following safety regulations have led a former employee to warn that Autopilot is not ready for the road

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.”

Read: Fired Tesla Technician Turns From Company Hero To Enemy Number 1

The comments come days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on X, the social media platform that he owns, 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.

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 surrounding Tesla vehicles’ ability to perceive the world around them have arisen since the automaker took the controversial decision to use only cameras, and no radar or LiDAR sensors. Krupski said that even the company’s own employees had spoken to him about experiencing phantom braking incidences — 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.