Elon Musk warns that people thinking negatively about self-driving cars could kill

If people are dissuaded from using autonomous vehicles then there's far more chance they'll die in a crash, the Tesla founder warned

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, PayPal and SpaceX (Getty)

Being scared of self-driving cars means that you’re killing people, Elon Musk has warned.

The Tesla founder and CEO has criticised people who write critical articles about self-driving vehicles, arguing that by putting people off using them they might be leading to deaths.

Experts have said that once self-driving cars are used everywhere they could keep everyone far more safe, by preventing accidents and driving more safely. But people remain terrified about autonomous vehicles, as multiple surveys have showed.

Mr Musk said that he was “disturbed” by the way that people discuss crashes using Tesla’s Autopilot technology, which at the moment is in its early phases but intends to eventually become fully self-driving.

Many people write about individual crashes, but avoid discussing the 1.2 million people who die per year because of crashes caused by vehicles being driven by people, he said.

The criticism came as part of a Q&A session with reporters about Tesla’s new autonomous driving technology. That intends to show how Tesla’s “Summon” feature can be used to take cars off the road – by allowing them to park themselves up when they’re not being used and then drive to their owner when needed, even if that meant the car driving all the way across a country.

“One of the things I should mention that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of Autopilot crashes, which are basically almost none relative to the paucity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year in manual crashes. [It is] something that I think does not reflect well upon the media,” Mr Musk said. “It really doesn’t.

“Because, and really you need to think carefully about this, because if, in writing some article that’s negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you’re killing people.

“Next question. ”

Mr Musk is correct that Tesla’s autopilot feature has been dogged by sometimes inaccurate or scary headlines. It has been implicitly blamed for crashes that have in fact been other human-driven cars’ fault, or instance.

But Patrick George and Michael Ballaban at Jalopnik argued that it wasn’t wrong to write or talk critically about self-driving vehicles.

“Musk’s outlook—that mere skepticism of autonomous driving technology puts blood on the hands of those who question it—is an abdication of responsibility,” they wrote. “It’s hard to tell whether it’s the result of pathological defensiveness or deep confusion about how criticism or journalism works, but it reeks of the technology sector’s belief that the thinkfluencers already know what’s best, and that to question or regulate their actions is to reject progress.”