Did Musk Back Trump To Save Tesla From Collapse?
Things could get dangerous.
It’s no secret that Tesla has backed itself into a corner. Musk has bet the entire company’s value and future on self-driving cars. Yet, Tesla’s FSD system is deeply flawed. It only uses a few cameras to “see” the world around the car, giving the system zero redundancy and a serious lack of spatial fidelity, making it wildly unsafe. As such, Tesla can’t pass the self-driving regulations, and their system is stuck as an incompetent driver assist system. But I think this might be why Musk backed the Trump campaign so vigorously, as it was his only viable route to escape this deadly dilemma.
Musk famously said that Tesla would be basically worth zero without self-driving cars. While this is certainly hyperbole, it is true that the reason Tesla’s stock is so overvalued is its perceived advantage in the self-driving race. I say “perceived,” as their Full Self Driving (FSD) system, which is meant to evolve into an autonomous system, is quite simply dangerous. Tesla’s publicly available data suggest that the current supervised FSD (which still has a human paying attention to the road) has a fatality per mile rate up to ten times the American average. This statistic is even more shocking when you realise that Teslas are safer in a crash than the average American car, suggesting that FSD is simply…
