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Leave the World Behind, the new Sam Esmail movie currently trending No. 1 on Netflix, includes a darkly hilarious shot at self-driving Teslas. After all, when an unknown enemy launches a cyberattack on the U.S., a hacked smart car becomes a dangerous weapon.
That’s exactly what happens to Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in Leave the World Behind, who find themselves fleeing from brand-new, self-driving Teslas gone rogue, as society collapses in the face of a cyberattack. They just want to leave Long Island, but the highways are blocked by an endless pile-up of white Teslas. Roberts realizes these cars never had drivers… just in time to dodge of the way of a new batch of kamikaze Teslas, in an intense game of real-world Frogger. It’s not exactly the kind of glowing endorsement most companies would want to see for their product.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to the scene on his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), and yet he seems to have willfully missed the point of this less-than-favorable product placement.
In response to the official Netflix account, which posted a clip of the Leave the World Behind Tesla scene, Musk wrote, “Teslas can charge from solar panels even if the world goes fully Mad Max and there is no more gasoline!”
OK, sure, solar panels would undoubtedly be useful at the end of the world. But did Musk actually watch Leave the World Behind? Lack of gasoline is not an issue in this story. The characters in this movie—a family who’s on vacation in Long Island when the U.S. is the victim of a widespread cyberattack—are dealing with the very early stages of societal collapse. They aren’t concerned about stockpiling gasoline right now; they’re more worried about the fact that all of their technology has been rendered useless—or, in this case, weaponized—by hackers.
Maybe a Tesla is the best vehicle to have in the zombie apocalypse—or in Mad Max—but this movie is about the cyber-apocalypse, dude. If you’re dealing with malicious hackers, you’re probably not going to want a car that can drive itself via a computer. That’s the point of the scene, in fact. It’s an indictment of just how vulnerable “smart” technology is to malicious players. This technology may be convenient for our daily lives, but if society succumbs to a cyberattack, we’re pretty much screwed. Especially if you drive a Tesla.
You can watch the clip below:
