The honest part: phantom braking — where the car brakes for a hazard that isn’t there — is real, generated hundreds of NHTSA complaints, and prompted a federal investigation. That’s a legitimate issue and Tesla shouldn’t be let off the hook for it. What’s misleading is the leap from “annoying false positive” to “dangerous defect that proves the system is broken.” Phantom braking is a tuning problem common to camera-and-radar driver-assistance systems across the industry, not unique to Tesla, and it errs toward caution (braking) rather than failing to brake. Tesla has reduced it over successive over-the-air updates, including the move to the vision-based and later end-to-end FSD stacks, precisely because the software can be fixed fleet-wide without a workshop visit. So criticise the false positives — they’re real and irritating — but “proves Autopilot is broken” overstates a calibration issue that has measurably improved.