I would never buy one. The damage he has done to the brand is as serious as if heād employed Savile or Harris as marketing directors.
Fortunately there are plenty of other choices.
Whilst not being a fan of Elon, dragging up old stories to make editorial comment is just tedious. Tesla were investigated, quite rightly by various motoring safety boards and had to ammend things but that was a while back.
Agree, but itās right to highlight the insidious nature of Musk and Teslas data harvesting.
Thats where he makes a lot of his income and yet despite US companies doing the same they try to deflect their actions and blame the Chinese.
Nobody who has ever written a line of code in their life would ever be totally confident of software in cars. The more sophisticated the software the more prone to error.
Iām not too happy either about over the air updates being pushed to me without details on what itās for and no option to opt out. I get to decide on the relatively trivial matter of new releases of my phoneās operating system, but when it comes to the software thatās keeping my family safe at 130kmh on the autoroute I donāt 
Maybe somebody here knows if there are legal standards for automotive software testing?
This isnāt just a Tesla problem either.
I guess the issue is regulation. For example, the pop out door handles that donāt should be failsafe and mechanical, not software driven. Any system for escaping from a crashed vehicle should be mechanical I would have thought.
I think regulation may even be going in the wrong direction with mandatory ādriver assistā features on new cars. For example the, in my case much loathed, lane assist, which tries to wrestle control from you if the cameras think you are deviating from the lane.
I first bought a car with this function in 2017. Out of interest Iād ordered all the driver assist options. Two options I turned off permanently about two weeks into ownership were lane assist and auto dimming headlamps. Both were rubbish.
Now though, due to regulations, you canāt turn off some āassistā systems permanently, you have to do it every time you āstartā the car. And as some are buried way down menus so you donāt bother. Thus the lane assist in our i4 annoys me all the time. On the plus side, the matrix LED auto dimming is excellent.
Renault, however, have been very smart. The R5e has a dedicated button that you can assign a variety of annoying stuff to, lane assist, speed warning, etc. and nobble them all with one press when you get in. All cars should have that.
Mine needs 2 presses
Youāre right, itās a āclick, clickā 
WOW that must be a powerful system, all I get is a gentle nudge.
I do. Iike the idea of āopt outā buttons.
Fly by wire as it is applies to a lot of vehicles these days and wrestling with lane assist happens of lots of ICE cars to. My brother hates his and has it turned off.
+1 with you on this. When I first came across this it freaked me out having never came across this before. I picked up a new company car from Paris, within 5 minutes the car was bleeping and the dash was flashing and the steering wheel harder to manipulate, I worked out what was causing it all so I drove to the first service station I found & turned off all of the bells & whistles I could find before causing an accident.
There should be only one pilot in the driving seat; if Iām driving, thatās me.
Oh yes, itās the S/W Iām suspicious of nor the propulsion
It has a high, medium and low setting. The low id barely noticeable, but for goodness knows what reason (OTA updates?) it resets itself to high. Which can come as quite a surprise 
Iāll put the opposite case.
When I specced the Tiguan, 2019 model, I got everything by way of safety and driver assistance that I could afford. Lane assist, radar, wake me up before you drift off: the whole kit and caboodle.
I would bet my reflexes and anticipation against someone in his 30s, and I always drive well within my capabilities.
Iāve never found lane assist intrusive. Sometimes I get the ātake over steeringā alert, but thatās often on motorways.
Iād have even more assistance next time, but Iām with you both in feeling that all the responsibility remains mine.
No, I would not buy a Tesla or any other EV for that matter.
I think that they are inherently dangerous as there is no means of the driver mechanically disconnecting the drive from the wheels. If there is a clutch, or even a neutral gear lever position on an automatic, it doesnāt matter if all the software goes crazy, you can at least mechanically disconnect the power source from the wheels and bring the car to a halt.
In my view, every EV should have a lever that mechanically operates a switch that disconnects the battery in an emergency.
The uncontrolled ārunawayā problem is not confined to electric cars. When I was a teenager I bought a Vincent Black Shadow in a very poor state of repair. As I carefully (but very illegally) rode it home, I opened it up a little to see what it would do. At this point the very frayed throttle cable tangled with the return spring of the throttle slide in the carburettor and held the throttle open resulting in a rapidly increasing speed which I could not control. There was no ignition to switch off and no apparent way of stopping the engine so I leant down and ripped off the plug lead (and yes it did hurt). I was not even wearing a crash helmet! It was only a little later I discovered the valve lifter lever.
There are about 60,000,000 EVs on the road worldwide.
How many incidents of EVs running out of control (that have not subsequently been identified as the fault of the driver) can you find: 10? 100? 1000?
Divide that into the number of cars to work out the odds of your EV running away with you.
According to the National Weather Service, the odds against getting struck by lightning in a lifetime is 1 in 15,300.
I think you have much more chance of being struck by lightning than being in an unstoppable EV.
The difference is you do have the option of not getting into an EV if you are THAT worried.
Given that more and more ICE vehicles are automatic and donāt have a physical drive selector youāre going to be running out of options at this rate.
This is all about many peoples distorted perception of risk. Weāre just not good at evaluating risk and will happily do thinks that may be hundreds of times or more risky than other things we are afraid to do.
Understandable, as our risk assessment software hasnāt been updated since the Sabre ToothTiger era.
But luckily weāll all soon have an actuary on our phone. So we can tap in āwhat are the chances of me being immolated in my Tesla today?ā.
