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Elon Musk finds himself pretty preoccupied with trying to Twitter (erm, “X”) into the ground these days.
But he’s still got a number of other failing business ventures on his hands that he needs to tend to.
Take, for instance, the massive mess that he left in a Texas town after a spectacularly failed Space X launch in April.
Then the there’s the company that he’s most-predominantly known for (pre-Twitter acquisition), Tesla. Musk’s electric car company has had its fair share of controversies.
From cars spontaneously combusting to self-driving models causing crashes, the electric vehicle company has waded through seemingly controversy after controversy.
But the latest one may just prove to be the largest.
Elon Musk Intentionally Misled Consumers About Mileage Ranges For Tesla Cars
A report by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzo of Reuters revealed that, at the behest of Musk, the company had been intentionally misleading consumers about the mileage range of its vehicles. The report states that programmers were instructed to write algorithms that intentionally showed “rosy’ mileage projections but would adjust back to reality once drivers dipped below 50 percent battery life.
“Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.” – Reuters
One source revealed to the reporters that the directive to fake or manipulate mileage range numbers came directly from Musk.
“Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the source told Stecklow and Shirouzo, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”
But it only gets worse from there. As customers began to discover the problem, they started to schedule service appointments to address what they believed was an issue with the car.
According to the report, Musk encouraged and incentivized workers to cancer those appointment.
But last summer, Tesla created the Las Vegas “Diversion Team” to handle only range cases, according to the people familiar with the matter.
The office atmosphere at times resembled that of a telemarketing boiler room. A supervisor had purchased the metallophone – a xylophone with metal keys – that employees struck to celebrate appointment cancellations, according to the people familiar with the office’s operations.
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The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.
Managers told the employees that they were saving Tesla about $1,000 for every canceled appointment, the people said. Another goal was to ease the pressure on service centers, some of which had long waits for appointments.
Neither Tesla nor Elon Musk responded to Reuters questions for the story.
Whether you believe Musk is a genius or conman is up to you. But the evidence appears to be piling up one direction.