Cars crashing into bollards, brakes slamming on to keep away from imaginary collisions, and greater than 2,400 complaints of automobiles accelerating out of their proprietor’s management. The 100 gigabytes worth of internal Tesla documents leaked to the German newspaper Handelsblatt current a sobering image of the EV firm’s technical limitations.

The 23,000 information obtained by Handelsblatt cowl points in Europe, the US, and Asia between 2015 and March 2022, and so they appear to point out severe flaws in Tesla’s Autopilot know-how. The revelations may see the corporate going through new stress from regulators, who’re prone to pore over the studies searching for proof that the corporate has misled authorities or clients over the protection of its automobiles.

The leaks may additionally reinforce a pervasive concern amongst Tesla buyers and analysts that the corporate has misplaced its method. Its vaunted self-driving know-how appears a great distance from being protected sufficient for the highway, and it will possibly’t appear to maneuver viable new merchandise from the drafting board to the showroom. Tesla hasn’t launched a brand new client automobile since 2020, and it’s extensively seen as falling behind other automakers, who’re stepping up their growth of recent EVs to satisfy surging demand. Half-hidden inside the rush of revelations is a teaser for a secret report on Tesla’s long-awaited “Cybertruck,” a weirdly angular pickup truck introduced in 2019. It’s unlikely to be excellent news.

“Tesla urgently needs a new credibility story,” says Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Centre for Automotive Research in Duisburg, Germany.

The content material of the leaked paperwork is surprising, with accounts of near-death experiences by the hands of Tesla Autopilot. But analysts say it’s not surprising.

“For most of us who have been covering Tesla for a decade now, this isn’t that surprising, and it is likely unsurprising for most Tesla customers too,” says Matthias Schmidt, an unbiased automotive analyst in Berlin.

Schmidt says that Tesla has lengthy taken a “move fast and break things” method to creating merchandise, resulting in considerations about whether or not its new releases are prepared for the highway. There have been 393 recorded deaths involving Teslas, 33 of which concerned Autopilot. Schmidt alleges that Musk “accepts driver death as a consequence of forwarding technology.” Musk didn’t reply to a request to remark for this story or handle Schmidt’s allegation.

It is commonly tough to separate the Tesla model from the character of its CEO. Musk has sometimes dismissed criticism of his merchandise—typically through Twitter, which he acquired for $44 billion final October. But the size of the German leaks may make it tougher for Musk to promote his model of the story, based on Dudenhöffer.

“He has thousands of bits of information, of customer complaints, and at the same time he tells people it’s the best product in the world,” Dudenhöffer says, evaluating the controversy to a scandal at Volkswagen within the mid-2010s, when it was found the automaker had been downplaying the environmental impact of its automobiles.

Dudenhöffer lays the blame for Tesla’s mounting troubles on Musk, who divides his time between operating Tesla, his rocket firm SpaceX, and Twitter, which has been in a state of perma-crisis since his takeover final yr. “He should not any longer be the CEO and lead Tesla,” Dudenhöffer says, “because he makes mistake after mistake after mistake.”