Report: Tesla’s Self-Driving Prioritizes Elon Musk’s Favorite Routes

Who, exactly, is teaching self-driving cars to drive? Clearly algorithms don’t have parent-algorithms who’ll take them to an empty parking lot on the weekends and walk them through the basics of stopping, starting and turning. There’s been a lot written about the work that goes into both programming software for autonomous vehicles and making sure that there’s an ethical underpinning in place for how they conduct themselves on the road.

A new investigative report suggests that for one automaker, the answer is a little simpler: certain drivers’ experiences are given a higher priority than others — including those of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Writing at Business Insider, Grace Kay reports that “images and video clips from Musk’s Teslas received meticulous scrutiny,” according to interviews with multiple Tesla employees past and present.

Musk wasn’t the only driver to get this treatment, Kay reports. Other “high-profile drivers,” as Kay describes them, also had their on-the-road experiences more heavily scrutinized by the software. What that translates to is a system that could prioritize the quirks and idiosyncracies of the roads frequented by Musk and these other drivers and give less emphasis to the experience of Tesla drivers who weren’t deemed prominent enough.

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A former Tesla employer told Business Insider that “[i]t seemed like we were purposely making [Musk’s] car better to make Autopilot look different than it was.” For a company that has famously used word of mouth marketing to popularize its vehicles, this feels both like an understandable twist and one that could backfire heavily in the long term. And while there’s nothing odd about a CEO or other corporate leader driving a prototype vehicle, the idea that some Tesla drivers are (apologies to George Orwell) more equal than others is a worrying turn of events.