Tesla's Response to the Model X Crash Is Just Not Good Enough

From a legal standpoint, Tesla Inc. has nothing to fear for. The Autopilot's disclaimer makes it perfectly clear that the driver is still responsible for anything that happens and that they should always be prepared to take control of the vehicle. Of course, that's easier said than done when traveling at highway speeds and the car starts to veer toward a big slab of concrete just 30 yards away.

We're not saying that's what happened in this case, but it's a possible scenario, and one that leaves the driver no chance to avoid the collision. The EV maker has been awfully quiet about this particular crash, despite its cars being permanently connected with Tesla HQ. In fact, its blog post from Tuesday doesn't even make a clear reference about whether the electric SUV had Autopilot engaged or not.

All the rest of its content suggests that is the case, but we don't have an official confirmation yet. While we can definitely understand how recovering the vehicle's logs could be a difficult task given the severity of the damage sustained, Tesla has so far been able to tell whether Autopilot was on or not in an instant without the need of accessing those logs. Whenever a crash arose after the Joshua Brown incident in 2016 with the suspicion of Autopilot being involved, Tesla was quick to announce the system was not at fault. It's not the case here.

The blog post, on the other hand, lists the numbers of times that particular stretch of the road has been navigated by Tesla vehicles on Autopilot. It's "roughly 85,000" since the system's inception and 20,000 from the start of this year without any incident. Why would Tesla mention this? Because, if the Autopilot does turn out to have been active, hiding behind numbers is the only thing it can do.

After blaming the severity of the crash on the absence of the crash attenuator (a perfectly justifiable claim backed up by visual proof), Tesla goes on to mention an independent review carried out by the U.S. Government that found Autopilot to reduce crash rates by 40%. Furthermore, a pretty unimpressive video (see the bottom of the article) of Autopilot "preventing" a head-on crash was published on the Tesla-friendly website Teslarati the other day. Such videos tend to show up right after the semi-autonomous system gets into trouble, so it just adds to the list of reasons to suspect Autopilot was indeed involved.

Despite being legally safe, that doesn't mean Tesla didn't take a hit. Its stock value has been going down, helped by a few other evolutions on the market - NVIDIA's decision to suspend self-driving testing or Waymo's partnership with Jaguar. And all this comes a little over a week ahead of the Q1 report which should shed light on the current Model 3 production rate which should be hitting 2,500 units a week by now.

It almost seems like Tesla enjoys living on the edge. Musk must be some kind of adrenaline junkie that risks a heart attack if his heart rate goes under 100. But Tesla has been here before and managed not only to carry on but continue its exponential growth. As serious as the X crash seems - and it is, considering a person lost their life - it's actually the Model 3 situation that will have the strongest impact on the company's future.

If it meets the target, then focus will shift and it'll be back to business as usual. If it doesn't, the stock will reflect it and the cash-strapped company might need its CEO to pull another rabbit out of the hat to keep going.

PS: It's worth noting that Tesla is fully cooperating with all the parties involved in the investigation to put all the pieces together and find out exactly what was that led to this tragedy.