Putting the Tesla HEPA Filter and Bioweapon Defense Mode to the Test

Unless you're being attacked with smog, this seems rather hyperbolic.

I can't imagine that two minutes breathing, say, aerosolized tweaked Spanish influenza, would be 'safe'. Maybe if you were in the car with the system running before the attack, though?

(And I'm as big a Tesla fan as there is, but that's an objective fact from a QA perspective.)

But then again, testing against smog is something a group of engineers can do on their own. Testing against lethal and highly contagious airborn pathogens is hardly something you can just up and do in your ordinary automotive lab. Doubt they're prepared to handle that. Even getting your hands on the pathogens in the first place is difficult, let alone handling them in a safe manner for testing.

But if they're going to advertise this, that's what they need to do.

Their filter does a good job cleaning particles out of the cabin air. Good on them.

Nevertheless, calling it "Bioweapon Defense Mode" is clearly a prize bit of marketing. A system designed to protect against an external bioagent wouldn't run huge amounts of outside air through the filter. That would just load the filter more quickly, impacting its performance (for chemical agents) and/or its energy requirement (for particles). Instead, you would cut the outside air intake as much as you could get away with, in order to buy the occupants time to drive clear of the plume.

Since they claim that the car is responsible for the decrease in the particle concentration in the test chamber, they must be running a pretty high flow of ambient air through the system. Of course, the ambient concentration would decrease even without the car's filter, due to particle deposition, and possibly due to losses in the sampling instrument. But then you only report those other loss rates if you're interested in science, rather than in marketing.