Netflix’s ‘Leave the World Behind’ takes a swipe at Tesla

Will the end of the world as we know it include a “Night of the Living Cars”? Netflix’s Leave the World Behind makes the case for it, taking a giant swipe at Elon Musk’s Tesla along the way.

In this slow-burn apocalyptic thriller from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, based on Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, one of the film’s two core families reaches a moment of decisive panic halfway through the film. What it leads to is a timely commentary on fears around self-driving cars and automation, and what happens when transportation gets hijacked.

The Tesla Model 3s are transformed from technological advancements into villains in one thrilling scene that taps into very real fears.

What happens in the Tesla scene in Leave the World Behind?

Amid a cyberattack across America, holiday home renters Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke) have spent the last few days with their family and, unexpectedly, the house’s owner G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la Herrold). As the reality of the disaster sets in, they decide to leave their luxe refuge. The plan is to drive their kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) to Amanda’s sister’s house in New Jersey. As G.H. warns them, it means they’ll have to drive through New York City, where they can’t be sure of the state of things.

Dismissing the warning, Amanda bundles her family into their Jeep Grand Cherokee and speeds off. They run into what appears to be a traffic jam on the freeway, the likes of which we’ve seen in countless zombie apocalypse films and TV shows. But the crashed cars are only Tesla Model 3s, and they’re all empty.

As Amanda reads a Tesla-branded standard features card fastened inside one of the cars, she realises, “They’re all brand new.” The score intensifies with Hitchcockian energy, and another Model 3 appears on the horizon, gunning for the family’s Jeep while presumably on Autopilot. The camera zooms dramatically in on the features card to the “Self-Driving Safety Features,” and Amanda puts the pieces together — they’re gonna get smushed by an autonomous car.

Amanda screeches their vehicle out of the way just in time, as more Model 3s hurtle toward them. In one long shot, the camera pans around the terrified family to pause briefly, offering a look through the windscreen, then swoops up to offer a bird’s-eye view of the highway, where cars of multiple models and makes are piled up, one after the other.

It’s a similarly shocking corruption of technology in the film as the crashed plane G.H. discovers and the tanker that beaches itself while Amanda’s family is relaxing by the water — transportation has officially been hijacked.

Where have we seen this before?

Beyond the Batmobile, Herbie, K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider, and the Transformers team, the thrills and perils of the self-driving car are nothing new for most movie-goers. It’s an especially popular plot device in sci-fi and action films, from the Johnny Cab in Total Recall to the self-driving car crash that defines Upload, as well as Tony Stark’s autonomous Audi in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Benji’s self-driving BMW iX in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

But the scene in Leave the World Behind is particularly similar in energy to a scene from 2017’s The Fate of the Furious. In the heart of New York, Charlize Theron’s villain Cipher pulls her “Night of the Living Cars” stunt that sees her remote-controlling cars on the streets and in showrooms across the city.

“It’s zombie time,” Cipher declares from her mainframe HQ, disabling “collision avoidance” and activating “auto-drive” in each vehicle, whether they have a driver in them or not.

Jeeps and Dodges drive out of dealerships, Chryslers and Minis throw themselves out of fourth-story parking garages, Fiats and Hyundais careen around corners and through newspaper stands in the middle of Manhattan, causing self-driving chaos in one of the busiest cities in the world.

Luckily, as Vulture’s Hunter Harris discovered, this exact scenario isn’t possible in real life — at least not yet.

“First off, there’s never been car hacking in real life that’s been done by a bad guy. To date, it has only been done by researchers,” security researcher Charlie Miller told Vulture in 2017, adding that Cipher’s team wasn’t big enough to hack this many cars at once. Maybe one hacked car at a time, like in this 2015 story from Wired (also featuring Miller) or in 2018’s Upgrade, is a more achievable task.

In Leave the World Behind, however, we have no idea how many people are behind the cyberattack, so perhaps it could be done.

Leave the World Behind plays on real fears around automation and self-driving cars

Notably, the Tesla scene does not appear in Alam’s novel; it’s a scene that was added to the script by Esmail. It feels like an overt swipe at Tesla’s Autopilot mode — or, to be fair, self-driving cars in general, and the concerns and fears around the technology. In the film, Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system has been subverted from a high-tech convenience into a dangerous, mindless threat, each car having been reprogrammed to drive to the same location using the same road — at speed. In the real world, Autopilot comes as standard on every new Tesla, though it costs a lot extra to activate “Full Self-Driving Capability.” In the film, Esmail imagines the possibility of hacking into Tesla’s system and gaining control of every new vehicle.

Of course, Tesla says its current features don’t make its vehicles wholly autonomous: “Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.”

As Mashable’s Stan Schroeder wrote in June, “Right now, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving driving assistance package is still essentially at Level 2, with the car helping out in certain scenarios, but the driver having to be alert and ready to take over in all situations.” In Leave the World Behind, Amanda points out that not one car in the Tesla scene had a driver at the wheel.

Offscreen, it’s a productive yet tumultuous time for self-driving cars — and not just because people are having sex in them. BMW is set to launch near-autonomous driving next spring (with caveats), MIT has its own version of a self-driving car, and Uber launched driverless rides with AV company Motional last year. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As for Tesla itself? In February, Tesla recalled 363,000 cars in the U.S. after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration raised concerns over the Full Self-Driving beta, which was rolled out in November last year. In July, CEO Elon Musk said the company might achieve fully autonomous driving “later this year.” But just days ago, a former Tesla employee shared his concerns with the BBC, saying, “I don’t think the hardware is ready and the software is ready,” adding, “It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads.”

In addition to an ongoing U.S. federal investigation over its Autopilot system, Tesla is facing a lawsuit over a fatal crash in 2019 near Miami, in which a Model 3 crashed into a truck that had driven into its path. The car’s driver, Stephen Banner, was killed. However, Tesla has been victorious in court this year. In October, Tesla won a civil trial over allegations that its Autopilot led to the death of Model 3 owner Micah Lee near Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, though Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise were granted 24/7 operating authority for driverless vehicles in San Francisco, Cruise lost its license in the city after one of its self-driving vehicles ran over and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet, after she’d been hit by a human-driven car. GM will “substantially lower spending” on autonomous vehicles in 2024 as a result.

With all this being slowly realised, the scene in Leave the World Behind feels like Esmail’s own swipe at the industry and the prevailing fears around automation, with arguably the most famous self-driving car company made a villain in the tech apocalypse. It’s simple but effective, and it sends the characters right back to their refuge, unable to escape or reach their family on the other side of the pile-up.

How to watch: Leave the World Behind is now streaming on Netflix.