‘Would you buy a Tesla today, Camp? I know you were romanced by the slick design and lifelong care-free promise of never having to stop at a gas station again.’

‘First of all, I cannot now and never could afford to buy a Tesla and certainly today I wouldn’t go near the car or the company. There is a new book available at my book store. The Tesla Files by the German investigative journalists Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden. They gained access to the company data through a whistleblower. Former Tesla technician Lukasz Krupski copied more than 100 gigabytes of internal Tesla documents, secret emails, contracts, security protocols and court documents from the company’s servers and made them available to the book authors.’

‘So, what new insights do we learn from The Tesla Files?’

‘A lot of empty promises by Musk himself who announced that his Tesla would drive autonomously by 2018. Instead, the Full Self-Driving feature proves to be error-prone software that ignores traffic lights, triggers emergency braking on motorways and skids on rain-soaked roads. According to the US Department of Transportation, more than a dozen people died in the US alone due to Tesla software driving errors.’

‘I would never trust an autopilot in city traffic. Mind you, it sounded good as an easy way to get home after a few drinks at the pub,’ I said.

‘In Germany, the Berlin Regional Court stated: ‘An activated autopilot means danger on the roads.’ Tesla management has always been aware that the self-driving software does not work reliably, according to the whistleblower.’

‘I always thought Tesla were the safest cars on the road.’

‘The defects in Tesla’s Cybertruck, are downright dangerous: Incorrectly glued stainless steel panels can come loose while driving, brakes can fail, accelerator pedals can jam. Just yesterday 46,000 Cybertrucks were recalled in the US alone to fix an exterior panel that could detach while driving. Musk’s customers act as test drivers and guinea pigs of unfinished products, testing the cars in road traffic, the authors of The Tesla Files claim.’