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Elon Musk Insists on Autonowashing, Says Tesla Will License Autonomy to Anyone

Imagine a company willing to license teleportation technology. If people took that seriously, it would quickly be under investigation. That’s not what's happening with Tesla when it claims to have autonomous driving technology and makes thousands of people pay up to $10,000 for the right to have robotaxis. At the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, Elon Musk acted again as if the company really had it: he said Tesla is willing to license it. But how can you license something you don’t have?
Tesla's 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders 17 photos
Photo: Tesla
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After Liza Dixon coined the expression autonowashing, Tesla repeatedly demonstrated it engages in the practice of making something sound more autonomous than it actually is. Although we can’t say that for sure, it seems Dixon came to that idea precisely due to Tesla’s behavior. As far as we know, no other company claims to have fully autonomous cars, which is what Musk did at the meeting. Check what he said there below:

“I think over time you’ll see all manufacturers will make electric vehicles and eventually all manufacturers will make autonomous vehicles. Tesla is open to licensing autonomy because I think autonomy will be such a significant lifesaver and preventer of technologies that it is not a technology we want to keep to ourselves. So I think it will be morally right to license it if they would like to use it.”

To reinforce that, Musk mentioned how he got to the meeting at the Giga Austin using FSD (1:20:41 in the video):

“I actually drove here from my friend’s house I’m staying at in Austin, which is quite far away and has quite a complicated drive and the car took me all the way from my friend’s house to the Gigafactory with no interventions. So, perfect drive.”

Let’s suppose the Tesla CEO had given warnings that this does not mean FSD is ready – which he didn’t. What Musk said was that “the car took” him to the meeting with a system called Full Self-Driving. If this is not autonowashing, we have no idea what it is. On top of that, he said it would be “morally right” to license this to other automakers.

Imagine that autonomous driving was really “basically a solved problem” for Tesla, as Musk said in 2016, five years ago. If his concern was really with the safety of people in traffic, why didn’t he propose to allow anyone to use autonomous driving for free? That’s what Nils Bohlin did with the three-point seat belt he invented back in 1959. He patented his idea but left it open for all carmakers to adopt it in their cars. And they did that.

Alexander Flemming went even further. When he “discovered” penicillin in 1928, he said that nature had invented it and decided not to patent it so that more people could use it. That was a lifesaving decision for billions of lives. Unfortunately, that also led to people who dispute the need to use seatbelts, antibiotics, masks, and vaccines, but that’s another story.

By stating traffic safety concerns while putting common drivers to test beta software, Tesla and Musk are “safetywashing” their pursuit for profits. Mahmood Hikmet already dissected that in a video you should definitely watch.

The truth is that licensing’s goal is to make money, not to avoid crashes. In Tesla’s case, it gets even more complex: Musk is discussing asking royalties for other automakers to use something that still does not exist.

That’s as ridiculous as saying that the Cybertruck is the cheapest Tesla vehicle currently for sale. That would only be valid if customers could really buy one, not just pre-order the electric pickup truck. So far, it is only a plan, at best a prototype. It will be the cheapest Tesla if Musk manages to deliver it by the end of 2022. So far, he only mentioned it might be produced by then, but deliveries are a different matter. Besides, we suspect its price will rise when the real deal can finally reach the market.

Apart from autonowashing and “safetywashing,” Tesla is also frequently accused of greenwashing its intents. While die-hard fans embrace the mission to save the planet one car at a time, Tesla keeps creating vehicles that are hard or too expensive to repair. The logic behind that is that people should buy new cars whenever old ones break down in any way. However, it is not sustainable to demand more and more raw materials in a world that already falls short on current demands, as Earth Overshoot Day reminds us at an earlier time every year (in 2021, it was on July 29).

It is time people stop falling in love with speeches that so lousily conceal the real intentions behind them. All companies are entitled to profits: it’s their raison d’être. What is not “morally right” is to present them as noble duties, especially when what is being sold is not ready. In FSD’s case, it gets even worse: putting beta software to the test on public roads with untrained drivers may make traffic more dangerous. That’s the opposite of what Musk claims to want from deploying FSD.

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About the author: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo
Gustavo Henrique Ruffo profile photo

Motoring writer since 1998, Gustavo wants to write relevant stories about cars and their shift to a sustainable future.
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