In what is certainly a surprisingly civil way to start the work week over on America’s greater coast of tech innovation, Elon Musk just handed a Google founder credit for one of his ideas.
Tesla’s “bioweapons defense mode” — which is available on the Model X and uses a HEPA filter to supply clean air to drivers when engaged, even supposedly in the event that you’re traveling through an airborne viral outbreak — was just touted by Tesla and Musk this morning by way of a new detailed demonstration summary:
The company placed a Model X in a bubble and pumped in “extremely dangerous” levels of pollution. Two minutes later, the HEPA filtration system had scrubbed the air in the Model X, bringing pollution levels from “extremely dangerous” to “levels so low as to be undetectable.”
By the way, here’s what the Model X’s air filtration menu looks like, from the Model X debut event back in September 2015:
“[We were able to] remove our gas masks and breathe fresh air while sitting inside a bubble of pollution,” the Tesla team writes.
When the doors are closed and the so-called “Bioweapon Defense Mode” is activated, the amount of air pollution drops quickly, according to this chart shared by Tesla and Musk:
Pretty impressive! And shortly after tweeting the release to brag to his followers about the experiment results, Musk actually followed up with a hat tip to Google’s Larry Page for inspiring the idea of a bioweapons defense mode:
Stand up gesture, Elon! Though we’re assuming that Tesla will retain all copyrights behind the technology as well as the profits that the feature brings. Musk isn’t that nice of a guy, after all.
If our future’s going to be polluted, we can at least take solace in our Teslas.
