Two Unflattering Tesla Videos Got Taken Off Social Media Yesterday

Which is, of course, understandable. The internet being the internet, that video was duplicated and is still available all over the place. Out of respect for the family, I won’t link to the video here. It’s got the original poster’s name and phone number watermarked all over it which makes it sort of difficult to see, but you can tell what’s going on.

The wreck seems reminiscent of one that happened just under a year ago, when a speeding Model 3 crashed and sent flaming battery cells flying, setting a bed in a nearby apartment on fire.

There’s lots of speculation that the video’s poster was paid to remove the video, but, again, there’s no proof.

We reached out to the person who shot and posted the video, Ian, and asked him why he posted the video in the first place. He decided to publish the video because he wanted to bring some attention to the crash, stating that

“I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion that cars shouldn’t explode.”

Ian also noted that he sent the video to the NHTSA and NTSB, as well as passing it on to the Miami police. He also said that the watermark was there to prevent local TV stations from using it, and removed it because of requests from the families of the people in the car, not because he was paid off. In context, I think he handled this about as well as anyone could.

The other video that was attempted to be scrubbed from the internet yesterday is perhaps a stranger situation. This one was a video showing a Seattle-area driver testing the Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta 10 software, and in that video the car seems to make a beeline for some pedestrians at a crosswalk.

The original video has become unavailable:

…seemingly because of a DMCA copyright challenge:

I don’t know for certain who issued the DMCA challenge to the video; of course people are suggesting Tesla was behind it, but I don’t think Tesla would have copyright claims to a video they didn’t shoot. The original poster of the video could have done it, though that would be a bit odd since they made the video public in the first place, but who knows at this point.

Of course, the internet’s gonna internet, so you can still see the video:

That is a pretty alarming failure there; I’m not sure if that woman in the red coat owed that Model 3 money or something, but the car sure did seem to point itself right at her.

Independently, both these videos show what seem to be pretty significant issues with Tesla’s cars. The first one brings up a lot of questions about just what happened when the car’s pan apparently impacted the ground to cause the battery packs to rupture and ignite—was there a suspension failure that allowed it to bottom out so violently? Was there some other factor at play?

It’s hard to tell, but it’s clearly an issue worth looking into.

For the FSD pedestrian-hunting video, I think if Tesla and their owners are going to insist on testing Beta software controlling a 4,000+ pound car on public roads, the more transparency the better, and that means videos showing how the car behaves, good and bad, should be available for the public to see.

Seems only fair if it’s on public roads, right?

Again, we don’t know for sure why these viral-trending videos were removed, but both being removed on the same day is, at the very least, interesting, and it’ll be worth watching what happens to other possibly unflattering videos in the future.

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