Car safety is paramount. Cars, being giant steel boxes that move at high speeds, are inherently dangerous, and there are all sorts of ways, large and small, your car can be made safer. Tesla, though, has stepped it up a notch, with an air filter that has a “bioweapon defense” mode.
Tesla’s CEO, the ever-hyperbolic Elon Musk, shared a graph on Twitter that would seem to claim you can drive a Tesla through a bioweapons attack and be perfectly comfortable. Of course, in the event of a bioweapons attack, you probably would have other issues to deal with, and just being in a Tesla wouldn’t help you survive. But it wouldn’t hurt!
Believe it or not, this does have a practical purpose. The air filter’s real job is to keep pollutants, stench, and other nastiness out of the cabin, and the only filter that would meet Tesla’s standards could also deal with bioweapons, so including a bioweapons mode is largely a matter of public relations. In fact, they crammed the car into a bubble with heavily polluted air, 80 times worse than the EPA’s bare-minimum acceptable air-quality standard, and are claiming their filter was actually scrubbing the bubble of pollution by the time it was done. A little skepticism should be warranted for that claim, but at least it’s a good filter.
You’ll find this filter on the Model S and Model X. No word on whether you can get a version with caltrops and a missile launcher, but we’re sure Tesla is working on it.
(Via PopSci)
