It happens too often. Someone sees a The owner of Tesla sleeping while driving on the highway, their car under the control of the driver’s assistance system of the Tesla driver. The next thing you know, it’s all over social media.
You may be wondering how Tesla managed to launch this product on public roads. Are there no regulations covering such features? Isn’t this a safety issue? According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, he really does manage under government oversight.
The Trump administration has focused its efforts on reducing fuel economy requirements. His arguments for doing so were that cars would become both cheaper and safer. That didn’t happen and it’s a mystery why Trump thought it would be. One explanation is he didn’t know shit about cars.
Unfortunately, fuel savings and emission control rebates were the only things Trump’s NHTSA managed to do. NHTSA’s major regulatory oversight business has ceased for four years without a director. Now, the Biden administration has a number of neglected tasks to investigate. Like the Times report shows, NHTSA has been pretty practical when it comes to driver assistance systems, especially when it comes to Tesla’s deceptive autopilot:
Officially, the National Administration for Highway Traffic Safety discourages such behavior by organizing a public awareness campaign last fall with the hashtag #YourCarNeedsYou. But his messaging is competing with Tesla marketing itself, which recently said it will start selling a software package for “Full Self Driving” – a term it has used since 2016, despite objections from critics and warnings from the company. – on a subscription starting with this quarter.
The fact that NHTSA has so far refused to deal with Tesla directly in this regard is strong for an agency that has taken a practical approach to a wide range of issues under the Trump administration.
“Inactive”, said the previous four years of NHTSA Carla Bailo, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research. “Asleep,” said Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Car Safety. “No direction,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor and automotive law expert at the University of South Carolina.
The agency passed Trump’s term without a Senate-confirmed administrator, leaving deputies in charge. He launched several safety investigations into Tesla and other companies, but left most unfinished. “A massive pile of arrears awaits the Biden administration,” said Paul Eisenstein, editor of The Detroit Bureau’s industry news site.
While the NHTSA has been missing on a number of issues, the lack of oversight of self-government is probably the biggest. The Times says level 2 autonomy is Ralph Nader’s biggest safety challenge Unsure at any speed. Nader’s stupid references aside, the Times has a point.
How to cope with emerging self-driving technologies is a long-term problem. But one thing is for sure, the way Tesla uses its customers while beta testers raise alarms with experts.
Whoever takes the lead must balance the long-term potential of next-generation cars to reduce pollution, traffic and greenhouse gases against the short-term risks of implementing new scale buggy technologies before they are fully verified. In the “move fast and break things” style of Silicon Valley, Tesla CEO Elon Musk accepted these risks.
While other driverless car developers – from General Motors’ Cruise, Ford’s Argo AI, Amazon’s Zoox, Alphabet Waymo, Independent Aurora and more – all take an incremental, slow approach. with professional test drivers behind the wheel, Tesla is “beta testing” its driverless technology on public roads, using its customers as test drivers.
Musk said last month that Tesla cars would be able to drive completely without human intervention on public roads by the end of this year. Make similar promises from 2016. No driving expert without a driver or leader in the automotive industry outside of Tesla has said he thinks it’s possible.
While law professor Smith is impressed with Tesla’s “brilliant” ability to use Tesla drivers to collect millions of miles of sensor data to help refine his software, “that doesn’t excuse marketing, because this this is by no means fully self-driven. There are so many things wrong with this term. It’s ridiculous. If we can’t trust a company when they tell us that a product is completely autonomous, how can we trust them when they tell us that a product is safe? ”
Eisenstein of the Detroit Office is even tougher. “Can I say that from the disc?” he said. “No, let me say it on the recording. I’m terrified of Tesla. They take the smartphone approach: put the technology there and find out if it works or not. One thing is to get out a new IOS that has caused problems with voice dictation. Another thing is to have a problem moving at 60 miles per hour. ”
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An NHTSA directive from the end of 2016 under the Obama administration considered “predictable abuse“As a potential defect in the implementation of autonomous driving technology. Unfortunately, under Trump the NHTSA did nothing. For the context, the directive appeared about a year after the launch of the software that allowed the assistance of the autopilot driver in Tesla Model S.
The inaction of NHTSA has given rise to another federal safety agency, the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB – which is best known for its investigations into aircraft and train incidents – has blamed the foreseeable abuse of an accident in 2018 where a Tesla Model X collided with a concrete separator.
Part of the problem is the lack of transparency on the part of Musk and Tesla about how secure the driver’s driver assistance system is, as well as the lack of data in general. From the Times:
Musk regularly publishes statistics showing that autopilot and full driving are safer than man-only cars. That could be, but even if Musk’s analysis is solid – several statisticians have said it is not – the data is owned by Tesla and Tesla has refused to provide university researchers with even anonymized data for independent confirmation. Tesla could not be reached – last year it disbanded its media relations department.
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In 2019, after a series of Tesla battery fires, NHTSA launched a probe into the company’s software and battery management systems. The agency later said it was also investigating the cooling pipes for alleged defects that could cause leaks. At the time, the agency did not release information it had about leak-prone battery cooling pipes that had been installed in previous versions of the Model S and Model X.
Since the end of 2016, many Tesla drivers have been complaining about the “clogging wheels” on their cars – a tendency for the suspension system to break, which sometimes caused the wheel to collapse or fall off the car. Chinese drivers filed similar complaints, and in October last year, Chinese authorities ordered the withdrawal of 30,000 Model S and Model X cars. A Tesla lawyer wrote to NHTSA a letter claiming no need to recall the U.S. and accused the driver of “Abuse” for problems in China. The NHTSA said in October that it was “closely monitoring the situation”.
Four days before Biden’s inauguration, NHTSA announced that Tesla’s touch screen hardware defects could cause the car’s rear-view camera to be incomplete, among other issues. Rather than order the withdrawal, the NHTSA said it had asked Tesla to voluntarily revoke about 158,000 Model S and Model X cars for repairs. On February 2, Tesla agreed to recall 135,000 of these cars.
Check out the entire Los Angeles Times report, worth reading!