Tesla Autopilot Has A Fatal Flaw

The Tesla Enigma: Behind the Smokescreen of 'Full Self-Driving'

Elon Musk shows an obsessive command of his supercar designs, including the smallest detail like the handles that retract. A succession of alarming events, however, has cast a long shadow over the brand's safety claims. From motorists unable to exit burning cars to inexplicable, sudden halts on the motorway, grave questions are mounting. One customer described the terrifying moment their car "unexpectedly lurched forward with their infant inside." With a growing number of fatalities and serious injuries linked to its technology, why does Tesla refuse to provide clear answers?

A Final Journey

Rita Meier, a 45-year-old, spoke during a video call on a Monday afternoon in the month of June of 2023. She recounted the final occasion she saw her husband Stefan. A half-decade prior, he was departing from their residence close to Lake Constance in Germany to attend a Milan trade fair. A video call bridged the years, but the memory remained painfully fresh.

He hesitated that morning. The choice was between his Model S from Tesla and her BMW. Stefan had not previously driven the Tesla on such a long trip. After checking the map for the location of charging facilities on the way, he decided to take the electric vehicle. Rita felt a sense of unease. She stayed behind with their trio of kids; the most junior of whom was not even one year old.

Catastrophe on the Motorway

At 3:18 p.m., Stefan Meier’s Model S became uncontrollable on the tenth of May 2018. He was on the A2 motorway in the vicinity of the Monte Ceneri tunnel, moving at roughly 100km/h. The vehicle crashed through numerous traffic signs and warning markers before colliding with an angled barrier.

Investigators later wrote that the impact sent the automobile airborne. It tumbled over itself multiple times prior to finally coming to rest. The vehicle landed after travelling over 70 metres to the opposing traffic lane, leaving a path of destruction. Witnesses reported the car ignited while it was in mid-air.

A Wall of Fire

Several people rushed to help. They made attempts to get the doors open on the burning car to save the man inside, but the vehicle was locked. The smooth, modern look of the Tesla, with its retracting handles, proved impenetrable.

When they perceived explosions and witnessed fire erupting through the glass, the would-be rescuers fell back. Even the fire crews, arriving twenty minutes afterwards, could not intervene. There was nothing to do but observe the Tesla as it was consumed by fire. At that time, Stefan Meier was still inside.

A Widow's Search Begins

Not yet aware of the accident, Rita Meier made attempts to phone her husband, who did not answer. Hours passed without a return call, a very strange occurrence for the committed father. She then tried to use Tesla's app to locate his car. The application had ceased to function.

By the time law enforcement officials came to her home later that evening, Meier was already fearing the worst. The collision gained significant media attention the following day. It was identified as among the initial deadly Tesla incidents in Europe.

The Remains of a Life

The company issued a public notice expressing its profound sorrow and assuring its complete cooperation with regional officials. Rita Meier remains uncertain about the reason for her husband’s death. She has carefully preserved everything the police returned to her after their inquiry that reached no conclusion. The incinerated remains of the Model S are stored in a garage rented for this purpose.

The scorched mobile phone is kept in a drawer at her home. She paid for a forensic analysis of the device, but it yielded no answers. Meier holds on to these painful relics, believing they might one day be needed to uncover the truth. She has not abandoned her desire to find out.

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The Autopilot Promise

Rita Meier's story is one of numerous that emerged after journalists started publishing stories about the Tesla Files. This leaked cache of documents contained a collection of private data totaling 100 gigabytes, supplied by an undisclosed source. An initial report focused on issues concerning Tesla's autopilot feature.

Autopilot enables the vehicles to for a short duration handle the steering, brakes, and speed. Although the company markets the feature as "Full Self-Driving" (FSD), the feature’s design is to supplement, not substitute for, a human operator. The person at the controls must stay prepared to take over instantly. This concept of self-piloting cars forms the central assurance on which Elon Musk established his corporation.

A Contradictory Reality

The leaked documents indicate a reality far removed from the marketing. They contain upwards of 2,400 user complaints regarding sudden acceleration. They also list over 1,500 reports of braking problems. These include 139 cases detailing emergency braking without any valid reason and 383 describe phantom braking occurrences set off by inaccurate alerts.

The files document over one thousand collisions. A separate list of incidents where owners brought up safety issues about the driver-assistance system contains over 3,000 separate records. The data spans from 2015 to March 2022, a period during which Tesla sold approximately 2.6 million vehicles equipped with Autopilot.

Voices of Fear

Customers described harrowing experiences. While some managed to avoid disaster, others wrecked in ditches, smashed into walls, or were involved in head-on accidents with other cars. "After taking my son to school, as I go to make a right-hand exit it lurches forward suddenly," one person noted.

Another driver recounted that their autopilot system had failed that morning when the car did not apply the brakes, almost causing a rear-end collision at 65 miles per hour. A third customer reported a terrifying event: "Today, while my wife was driving with their infant aboard, the car unexpectedly accelerated for no reason." Unwarranted braking created equivalent levels of alarm, with one operator writing, "Our car simply stopped on the freeway. That was frightening."

A Chilling Parallel

After connecting with journalists, Rita Meier found that the Tesla Files held information connected to her husband's car. The record was created just a single day following the deadly crash and simply noted, "Vehicle was in a collision." The case was marked "resolved."

Anke Schuster's husband, Oliver, also passed away in a mysterious Tesla crash. She, too, found his Model X included in the leaked files, also marked "resolved." Oliver, a technology aficionado who held a fascination for Musk, was killed on the thirteenth of April in 2021 when his car veered off a highway in north-east Germany and collided with a tree. The vehicle ignited, and he perished in the fire while the fire department was unable to intervene.

A Pattern of Obfuscation

The parallels between the two cases are disturbing. For both incidents, which happened with a gap of almost three years between them, investigators formally asked Tesla for vehicle information. In the Meier case, personnel from Tesla asserted that no information existed. Regarding the Schuster situation, they stated there was no relevant data.

This distinction is crucial. It suggests the company, not the authorities, decided what information was pertinent to a deadly accident inquiry. In both situations, faced with a lack of data, prosecutors were left with no choice but to close their investigations, leaving the families with no answers.

A Fatal Design Flaw

The tragedies extend beyond software. Elon Musk is known as a perfectionist who tends to micromanage, and his aesthetic whims can override safety. The retracting door handles on Tesla vehicles pull back into the door panels when the car is in motion.

This mechanism relies on the battery's charge. The manual states that if an airbag is triggered, the doors are meant to unlock and the handles pop out. Musk insisted on this design despite cautions from his engineering staff. Starting in 2018, these handles have been implicated in a minimum of four deadly collisions in both the US and Europe, resulting in five deaths.

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The Dobbrikow Tragedy

A particularly tragic case occurred on a rural road near Dobbrikow, Germany, in February of 2024. A pair of 18-year-olds lost their lives when the Tesla they occupied struck a tree and ignited. First responders could not get the doors open since the handles were recessed. The young people died from the fire in the car's back seat.

An expert assigned by the court from Dekra, a leading German testing authority, concluded the incident "qualifies as a malfunction." The report stated the non-extension of the handles was a "critical element" in the deaths. Had the system worked, the expert assumed rescuers could have extracted the occupants before the blaze intensified.

Regulators Take Notice

The investigation sent shockwaves through the German transport sector. Germany's federal motor transport authority revealed intentions to work with other regulatory agencies on updating global safety protocols. The country's largest automobile club, ADAC, released a formal suggestion for Tesla operators to keep emergency window-breaking tools in their cars.

ADAC warned that the handles could substantially obstruct rescue operations, also for trained professionals. Despite this, Tesla has shown no sign of altering the design. This reflects Musk's operating principle: release technology first and deal with the consequences later. Public roads have become his laboratory.

Phantom Braking in Germany

The KBA's scrutiny of Tesla has been ongoing. The agency has investigated "phantom braking," where the car brakes suddenly and sharply without any cause. A German court in Traunstein recently confirmed the existence of this dangerous issue. An independent expert, appointed by the court, documented five instances of "implausible" behaviour during a 600km test drive.

In one alarming incident, a Model 3 abruptly slowed from 140km/h to 94km/h on an unrestricted stretch of motorway, creating a "considerable hazardous situation" for following traffic. The test was aborted for safety reasons. Tesla has historically dismissed such reports as driver error.

Hacking the 'Black Box'

The inner workings of Tesla's data systems have long been an enigma. Three doctoral candidates at the Technical University of Berlin managed to hack Tesla's autopilot hardware. The security researchers discovered a concealed "Elon Mode," a configuration where the automobile operates in a completely autonomous capacity, not needing the operator to maintain contact with the steering wheel.

They also successfully retrieved information that had been erased, which included video clips, and pinpointed precisely what information Tesla transmits to its central systems. Their findings directly challenge the company's narrative of data unavailability. The hackers revealed that information is kept by Tesla in three separate locations: on a memory card, in a data recorder for events (EDR), and on its company servers.

The Data Trail

The framework is structured around "trigger events." For instance, if an airbag is activated or the car makes contact with an object, the vehicle's computer is engineered to store a specific collection of data in the EDR and then send it to the company. Barring a total lack of network signal in the area, data should have been recorded for the incidents involving Meier and Schuster.

Tesla had asserted in the past that its vehicles did not have an EDR as defined by law, but later reversed this position, even releasing a tool for owners to access the data. However, accessing this requires a hardware kit costing hundreds of pounds, and the data is uploaded to Tesla for interpretation, keeping the company in control.

A Suspicious Death

Concerns are not limited to customers. Hans von Ohain, a 33-year-old who worked for Tesla in Colorado, died on the sixteenth of May, 2022, when his vehicle collided with a tree and ignited. His passenger survived and informed authorities that von Ohain, who had consumed alcohol, had turned on the Full Self-Driving feature.

Tesla claimed it could not confirm if the system had been active because the vehicle did not send any data for the incident. Months later, Elon Musk personally intervened, claiming on social media that von Ohain had not installed the latest software. This was contradicted by friends and his widow, who said he used the system frequently as a company perk. The case was closed with no retrievable information recovered.

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The Las Vegas Spectacle

The claim of "no data" is particularly jarring when contrasted with other incidents. A Tesla Cybertruck detonated on January 1, 2025, in front of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The individual responsible for the event—a veteran of U.S. special forces—had packed the rented vehicle with explosives before taking his own life.

Within hours, Musk was on social media. "The entire senior leadership at Tesla is looking into the situation right now," he wrote. He later confirmed the detonation resulted from bombs in the truck bed, stating, "All vehicle telemetry was normal at the moment of the blast." Suddenly, Tesla had access to everything, turning a tragedy into a demonstration of its technology.

The Double-Edged Sword

This power to monitor has alarmed privacy experts. David Choffnes of Northeastern University warned of the "sweeping surveillance" involved. While helpful in some cases, he noted, "it is a two-sided issue. Companies gathering this information can potentially misuse it."

Tesla's ability to produce detailed data when it chooses is well-documented. Regarding a couple who perished in Saratoga, California, having gone through a red light at 114mph, investigators reconstructed the entire event. The data showed every action, from opening a door to pressing the accelerator, accurate to the millisecond. The data is there—until Tesla decides it is not.

Scrutiny from US Regulators

Multiple inquiries into Tesla have been initiated by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). A report from the NHTSA in April of 2024 determined that Tesla did not properly ensure that drivers stayed attentive while its driver-assist features were engaged. The agency reviewed 956 crashes and found "shortfalls in Tesla’s telematic information," which prevented a determination of how frequently autopilot was engaged during accidents.

The report also noted Tesla's internal statistics are misleading. They only include crashes where an airbag is activated, an event that happens in only 18% of accidents documented by police. This suggests that the real accident frequency is considerably greater than what Tesla discloses to the public and investors.

A Pattern of Evasion

Previously, the NHTSA had identified something peculiar. It detailed 16 incidents where Tesla cars collided with parked emergency vehicles. In every instance, the autopilot system turned off a moment before the collision. This is an insufficient amount of time for a driver to respond. Critics warn this could be a strategy to claim in legal proceedings that autopilot was not engaged at the moment of the collision, thereby dodging corporate responsibility.

This behaviour was replicated in a viral experiment by former NASA engineer Mark Rober in March 2025, further fueling doubts about the system's integrity and the company's transparency.

A Culture of Concealment

Leaked emails from an engineer in the UK who managed Tesla’s Safety Incident Investigation program reveal a disturbing internal culture. His memos show that Tesla deliberately limited documentation of certain problems to lower the chance that this information could be demanded through a legal summons. His efforts to establish clearer protocols were resisted by US leadership, who were motivated directly by concerns over legal ramifications.

Tesla has repeatedly been asked about its data practices, the unresolved fatal crashes, and the criticisms from safety authorities. The company has failed to provide a response to any of these questions. In June 2025, Tesla went to court to block the disclosure of its crash data, arguing it would cause "competitive harm."

The European Barrier

Tesla's push for autonomous driving faces significant roadblocks in Europe. The UK's Department for Transport has blocked key features of FSD over safety concerns, requiring drivers to keep their hands in contact with the steering wheel at all times. This conflicts with Tesla’s model of "supervised autonomy."

Furthermore, strict EU and United Nations regulations, including the General Safety Regulation, mandate advanced safety systems and set a high bar for the approval of automated vehicles. Features common in the United States, like system-initiated lane changes, are not currently permitted on European roads, and regulators are moving cautiously. Musk has voiced frustration, but for now, the full version of FSD remains illegal in the EU.

The Human Cost of Innovation

The core of the issue lies in a simple question of trust. All people on the road rely on the cars surrounding them not to pose a danger. Can that reliance be maintained when a vehicle is, to some extent, driving itself, guided by a system shrouded in secrecy?

The term "black box" originally referred to the actual data recorders in vehicles. For many Tesla crash victims, these devices have proven useless, often destroyed by the very fires they were meant to document. But the name now holds a second, more sinister meaning. Tesla has transformed into a black box—a non-transparent, mysterious entity with its actual functions hidden from public view. Tesla alone possesses the knowledge of how its vehicles genuinely function, yet more than five million of them now travel on our roads.