It is unclear whether Elon Musk knows the footage exists or that it has been shared. Photo / Getty Images
It is unclear whether Elon Musk knows the footage exists or that it has been shared. Photo / Getty Images
Tesla workers shared videos of naked customers and could see inside Elon Musk’s own garage using cameras installed in the company’s vehicles.
Ex-employees described watching footage of a man approaching his car naked, a car hitting a child at high speed and catching sight of “sexual wellness items” kept inprivate rooms.
The videos were captured on cameras built into Tesla vehicles to assist with driving, despite the electric car company reassuring on its website that they were “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy”.
Videos of intimate moments and crashes spread “like wildfire” in the Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2020, ex-employees told Reuters.
Tesla states in its online “Customer Privacy Notice” that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle”.
But seven former employees told Reuters the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings – which risked the possibility of revealing a Tesla owner’s home.
“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” said another former employee.
“Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”
Another employee described seeing “scandalous stuff” including “scenes of intimacy” and “certain sexual wellness items”.
The employee’s exploits even resulted in an inside look at Tesla chief Elon Musk’s own home.
A Tesla Model Y Long Range. Photo / AP
Around three years ago, a group stumbled across and shared a video of a unique submersible vehicle parked inside a garage
The car was a white Lotus Esprit sub, nicknamed “Wet Nellie”, which had been used in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977.
It had been purchased by Musk for approximately US$968,000 ($1.55m) at an auction in 2013.
It is unclear whether Musk knows the footage exists or that it has been shared. Musk did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
One video of a collision in 2021 showed a Tesla moving at high speed in a residential area before hitting a child riding their bike, one ex-employee said. The child and bike flew through the air in different directions.
Other more uneventful clips, including funny road signs or pictures of dogs, were uploaded to Photoshop to be made into memes with captions poking fun at them.
‘A breach of privacy’
“If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny’,” said a former picture editor.
“People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny.”
Tesla sometimes cracked down on inappropriate sharing of images on public Mattermost channels.
“It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people,” said one former employee.
In China, some government compounds and residential neighbourhoods have banned Teslas because of concerns about their cameras.
Musk responded in a virtual talk at a Chinese forum in 2021 that the company would “get shut down” if Tesla cars were used to “spy in China or anywhere”.
