Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Edward Niedemeyer.

He is the former editor-in-chief of The Truth About Cars blog.

He has been a contributor to Bloomberg View, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.

His book on Tesla, Ludacris, The Unvarnished story of Tesla Motors, has been called the

best take on the company to date by Forbes. It is a remarkable piece of work. There is probably

no greater expert on the career of Elon Musk and of the development of Tesla.

Edward Needemeyer is an expert on the auto industry and with a specialty in electric and autonomous cars.

One more thing to plug, you're the host of the Autonacast podcast, which is about the development of autonomous cars, Edward Needamara.

Nice to talk to you.

Likewise.

Thank you so much for having me.

I've really been looking forward to it for a while.

I've cited your work before because your book is truly fascinating and it's quite timely having

you on because I literally just looked at the front page of the New York Times this morning and the headline pushing for self-driving Tesla Musk downplayed tech limits is straight on the front page.

And this is something that you will get to the issue of autonomous driving and its development and the safety issues around there.

But here's where I want to start.

I think that Tesla and Elon Musk are quite fascinating.

I'm not, as people who've read my work on Musk might probably know, I'm not a huge fan of

Elon Musk, although such fans do exist as you certainly have found out personally.

But I want to start with, you have now spent a considerable portion of your life and many, many

hours researching this company, this person, this industry. You have developed a reputation as a skeptic of many of the claims put out

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