Elon Musk to the media: 'You're killing people'

Elon Musk has a message for journalists: Embrace self-driving cars or it will cost lives.

"You're killing people," Musk said in a call with reporters on Wednesday in relation to negative coverage of autonomous vehicles. The call was part of an announcement that Tesla will build advanced driverless technology into all its future vehicles.

Musk made the statement early in the call in response to one of the first questions. He said it after pointing out that tens of thousands of people die in accidents every year while driving regular (non-driverless) cars, and that he believes there is an inordinate amount of attention paid to the accidents involving self-driving technology such as Tesla Autopilot, which Musk says are "almost none."

Here's the full quote:

One of the things I should mention that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of Autopilot crashes, which are basically almost none relative to the media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year in manual crashes. It's something that I think does not reflect well upon the media. It really doesn’t. Because -- and you need to think carefully about this -- because if, in writing some article that’s negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you’re killing people.

Clearly Musk, who sounded even more testy than usual on the call, perceives a hypocrisy in the disparity of coverage about driverless technology, and believes the tech to be demonstrably safer than human driving, at least when used correctly. In the high-profile crash earlier in the summer, the driver was apparently watching a movie while the car was "driving."

The Autopilot in current Tesla vehicles, such as the one that crashed, is also less capable of the self-driving tech now being built into future Teslas, according to Musk. He said new Teslas, including the upcoming Model 3, will have Level 5 driverless tech, which is generally defined as a car that can drive itself in virtually all situations.

While events such as the Autopilot crash have raised questions about the various technologies and regulations around self-driving cars, many reporters and commentators have also spoken out in favor of the concept. When Mashable's Chris Taylor pointed this out to Musk on Twitter, he responded that those people are "underappreciated."

Correction: This article originally misquoted Musk's comment about the number of crashes with cars with autonomous tech. Instead of "practically zero," he said "almost none."