The online Tesla fan, owner and investor ecosystem has been roiled by controversy over the last week, as the latest changes to pricing and options appear to punish the early adopters of Tesla's "Enhanced Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" options. Conflict between the betrayed early adopters and the defenders of Tesla's decision has been so intense that the forums that cater to Tesla fandom have had to heavily moderate and consolidate the heated discussions, address attacks on the communities themselves, and issue calls for de-escalation and reconciliation. Even Electrek, an outlet that has elevated shilling for Tesla to a way of life, came out against the latest price cut calling it a "bait-and-switch" that "does a disservice to early buyers" and documenting a full-blown protest by Chinese Tesla customers.

Having found myself on the receiving end of the Tesla fan community's wrath before, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bemused to see its fundamentalist intolerance of criticism, paranoia and righteous fury turned on itself for a change. The controversy itself is mildly interesting in that it inflames the old divisions between owners and investors, and exposes the tension between Tesla's need for profits and its world-changing mission, but it's not nearly as interesting as, well, almost everything else about Autopilot and "Full Self-Driving." For a group of people who are quick to frame their support of Tesla in terms of its altruistic mission, Tesla fans seem a lot more worked up about an issue that hits their pocketbooks than any of the literal life-and-death issues around Tesla's automated driving program.

The fact that automated driving systems are a matter of life was punctuated again this week by the death of a Tesla driver named Jeremy Beren Banner, in a crash that appears to be terrifyingly similar to the one that killed Joshua Brown in early 2016. Like the Brown crash, the Banner incident involved a Tesla Model S on a divided road with occasional cross-traffic being driven directly into the side of a crossing semi truck, shearing off its roof and then continuing to drive for some distance after the collision. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transit Safety Board are investigating the crash, particularly whether the Autopilot system contributed to the fatality, as the NTSB found that it did in the Brown crash.

The striking similarities between the recent crash that killed Banner and the 2016 Brown crash means this latest investigation could have enormous consequences for the future of Tesla's Autopilot feature. In its investigation of the Brown case, the NTSB found that two aspects of Autopilot's design had contributed to the fatal crash: a lack of "operational design domain" limits, essentially the ability to activate Autopilot even on roads where Tesla says it isn't safe, and the lack of sufficient driver attention monitoring. These findings ultimately went nowhere, as the NTSB has no regulatory power and NHTSA's report that found Autopilot reduces crashes by 40%, instantly putting public concerns about Autopilot on ice. With NHTSA's report only recently exposed as a whitewash based on bad data and worse analysis, another Autopilot-related fatality under similar circumstances could put enormous pressure on the regulator to act. But then, so too could an ongoing NTSB investigation into the death of Walter Huang, yet another instance (along with Gao Yaning in China) of a Tesla on Autopilot driving into a stationary object at high speed.

Or, to be as precise as possible, the Teslas were in fact being driven into stationary objects at high speed by Huang and Brown, who Tesla says were responsible at all times for their own safety. This legal disclaimer has been Tesla's first and last line of defense against criticisms of Autopilot, supplemented only by consistently misleading and easily-debunked statistical comparisons intended to prove that Autopilot is somehow also safer than human drivers. How Autopilot can be both intrinsically safer than any human driver and simultaneously utterly dependent on the human driver to keep the vehicle safe is a question Elon Musk recently had to dance around when asked by TechCrunch's Kirsten Korosec if it might be "a problem that you're calling this full self-driving capability when you're still

going to require the driver to take control or be paying attention" [disclosure: Korosec is my cohost at The Autonocast and a friend].

Musk's full reply (via transcript provided by Paul Huettner on Twitter) rhumbas right past the contradiction staring him in the face and pirouettes into more familiar territory: