New York Times, FX Team Up for Elon Musk Exposé

There’s an Elon Musk exposé on a possible coverup of Tesla deaths coming to FX next month as part of the network’s The New York Times Presents series.

According to Variety, “Elon Musk’s Crash Course” will take a critical look at Musk’s Tesla automaker and its efforts to create fully self-driving cars:

The film will dive into how Tesla’s Autopilot program has resulted in several deaths that Musk and the company has yet to publicly acknowledge, and details Musk’s efforts to kill government investigations into the incidents. Several former Tesla employees will be featured in the documentary, speaking out against Musk for the first time.

According to TeslaDeaths.com — yes, that’s a real site — there have been 254 deaths in accidents involving Tesla electric vehicles since 2013. Sometimes the driver was at fault, sometimes it was the fault of the driver of the other car, and at least one fatal accident involved a Tesla’s mechanical failure. Twelve of those deaths involved Tesla’s controversial autopilot, and some of those involved drivers using the so-called autopilot as an actual autopilot instead of just a driving aid.

Personally, I’m not a fan of electric vehicles generally or Tesla specifically — and I’m even less of a fan of self-driving cars. They’ve always seemed to me to be a potentially dangerous solution in search of a problem.

Although if the numbers continue to improve, I might have to change my mind.

My own prejudices aside, why would the NYT — completely on board with the “Green New Deal” and mandatory electrification — set its sights on the man with the most successful EV company in the world?

Maybe for the same reason that Presidentish Joe Biden frequently “forgets” to mention Tesla when touting American electric car production: unions.

Or in Tesla’s case, a lack of unions.

Tesla, whatever its other faults might be, remains a non-union workshop, and that’s made the EV carmaker a frequent target of the Left.

Saving unions, you see, is apparently more important than saving the Earth.

(Spoiler: the former aren’t worth saving and the latter doesn’t need saving.)

Musk has also routinely embarrassed Amazon founder (and the world’s second-richest man) Jeff Bezos. Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company has yet to achieve orbit and is years late delivering the vital BE-4 engines that are supposed to power ULA’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle.

To date, Blue Origin’s most visible accomplishment has been a series of celebrity near-space launches — basically fancy versions of the flight Alan Shepard made in 1961.

Meanwhile, Musk’s privately-held SpaceX is set for 50 or more orbital launches this year alone, including crewed missions to the International Space Station.

But Bezos also owns the Washington Post, so who knows what hit-piece Musk might have to deal with next.