In March of last year, a Tesla employee was fired for posting a video of his private Model 3 running into bollards while in Full Self-Driving Mode Beta. Well, he’s back and with a much more disturbing video.
Tesla fired John Bernal from his position of advanced driver assistance systems test operator after posting video of his personal Model 3 going a little haywire while driving around Silicon Valley. The company claimed Bernal violated employee social media use standards, but those standards were vague. Bernal also was very upfront about his hobby of cataloguing off-hours driving of his private vehicle.
After posting the video to his YouTube page, AIAddict, Bernal lost his job and his employee access to FSD Beta revoked (though he still had previous FSD software on his personal Model 3). He’s still making videos, but he’s added NIO cars to the channel. Earlier this month, Bernal posted a video of FSD doing something extremely dangerous — running a red light while turning left onto a highway:
Pretty scary stuff. This is the same FSD that Elon Musk expects to emerge from Beta testing and be available on all Teslas by the end of this year. Bernal posted yesterday that his videos have once again caught the eye of some of the agencies looking into Tesla’s FSD program:
Tesla is indeed under investigation from multiple government outlets. The Department of Justice opened a federal probe into potential criminal charges in 2022. NHTSA has opened special investigations into the deaths of at least 20 people who have died while since 2016. Earlier this year, Tesla issued a recall of the over 350,000 vehicles with FSD Beta software based of a variety of safety concerns brought forward by NHTSA. Tesla is also being investigated by the California DMV.
This is all to say that fully self-driving Teslas by the end of the year is not something that is going to happen.