This is happening very often. Does anyone see a Tesla owner sleeping while driving down the highway, his car under the control of the Tesla autopilot driver assistance system. The next thing you know is that it’s on all social media.
You may wonder how Tesla managed to launch this product on public roads. Are there no regulations covering these resources? Isn’t it a security issue? According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, really breaks down under government oversight.
The Trump administration has focused its efforts on reducing fuel economy requirements. His arguments for this were that cars would become cheaper and safer. It didn’t, and it’s a mystery why Trump thought it would happen. One explanation is he didn’t know shit about cars.
Unfortunately, fuel economy and reversals of emission control were the only things that Trump’s NHTSA managed to do. NHTSA’s major regulatory oversight work came to a standstill for four years with no director in charge. Now, the Biden administration has an accumulation of neglected tasks to explore. As the Times report shows, NHTSA has been virtually hands-off when it comes to driver assistance systems, specifically when it comes to Tesla’s autopilot, mistakenly called:
Officially, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration discourages such behavior by conducting a public awareness campaign last fall with the hashtag #YourCarNeedsYou. But his message competes with the marketing of Tesla itself, which recently said it will start selling a software package for “Full Self Driving” – a term it has been using since 2016, despite objections from critics and warnings in the small print itself. company – on a subscription basis starting this quarter.
The fact that NHTSA has so far refused to confront Tesla directly on the matter is characteristic of an agency that has taken a direct approach to a wide range of issues under the Trump administration.
“Inactive” is how Carla Bailo, chief executive of the Center for Automotive Research, summed up NHTSA’s previous four years. “Dormant,” said Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. “No direction,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor and specialist in autonomous vehicle law at the University of South Carolina.
The agency fulfilled Trump’s full mandate without a Senate-confirmed administrator, leaving deputies in charge. He launched several security investigations at Tesla and other companies, but left most of them unfinished. “A huge pile of pending orders” awaits the Biden government, “said Paul Eisenstein, editor of industry news site The Detroit Bureau.
Although NHTSA is absent on a number of issues, its lack of supervision in autonomous management is perhaps the greatest. The Times says level 2 autonomy is the biggest security challenge since Ralph Nader Unsafe at any speed. Leaving aside Nader’s silly references, the Times is right.
How to deal with emerging autonomous driving technologies is a long-term problem. But one thing is for sure, the way Tesla uses its customers as beta testers sounds the alarm among experts.
Whoever is in charge must balance the long-term potential of next-generation cars to reduce pollution, traffic and greenhouse gases and the short-term risks of deploying new technologies with scale bugs before they are fully examined. In the “move fast and break things” style of Silicon Valley, Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has embraced these risks.
While other developers of driverless cars – from General Motors’ Cruise, Ford Argo AI, Amazon Zoox, Alphabet’s Waymo, independent Aurora and more – all take a slow, incremental implementation approach with professional test drivers behind the wheel, Tesla is “ beta test ”its driverless technology on public roads using its customers as test drivers.
Musk said last month that Tesla cars will be able to drive alone without human intervention on public roads later this year. He has been making similar promises since 2016. No driverless car expert or automotive industry leader outside Tesla said he thinks this is possible.
While law professor Smith is impressed by Tesla’s “brilliant” ability to use Tesla drivers to collect millions of miles of sensor data to help refine his software, “this does not excuse marketing, because it is by no means fully autonomous. There are so many things wrong with that term. It’s ridiculous. If we cannot trust a company when it tells us that a product is fully autonomous, how can we trust it when it tells us that a product is safe? “
The Detroit Bureau’s Eisenstein is even more severe. “Can I say that off the record?” he said. “No, let me say that in the registry. I am shocked by Tesla. They are taking the smartphone approach: put the technology out there and find out if it works or not. It is one thing to launch a new IOS that has caused problems with voice dictation. Another thing is to have trouble moving at 60 miles an hour. “
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An end-2016 NHTSA directive under the Obama administration considered “predictable abuse”As a potential defect in the implementation of autonomous driving technology. Unfortunately, under Trump NHTSA did nothing. To put it in context, the directive came about a year after the launch of the software that allowed Autopilot driver assistance on the Tesla Model S.
NHTSA’s inaction drew the ire of another federal safety agency, the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB – which is best known for its investigations of aircraft and train incidents – blamed the foreseeable abuse of a 2018 accident where a Tesla Model X hit a concrete divider.
Part of the problem is Musk and Tesla’s lack of transparency regarding the safety of the autopilot driver assistance system, as well as the general lack of data. From the Times:
Musk regularly issues statistics in order to show that Autopilot and Full Self Driving are safer than human-driven cars. That could be, but even if Musk’s analysis is sound – several statisticians said it was not – the data is owned by Tesla, and Tesla declined to make even anonymous data available to university researchers for independent confirmation. Tesla could not be reached – it closed its media relations department last year.
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In 2019, following a series of Tesla battery fires, NHTSA launched an investigation into the company’s battery management systems and software. The agency later said that allegedly defective cooling tubes that could cause leaks were also being investigated. At the time, the agency did not disclose information it had about battery cooling tubes subject to leaks installed in the first versions of the Model S and Model X.
Since the end of 2016, many Tesla drivers have complained about “whopy wheels” in their cars – a tendency for the suspension system to break, which sometimes caused a wheel to break or fall off the car. Chinese drivers filed similar complaints, and last October, Chinese authorities ordered a recall of 30,000 Model S and Model X cars. A Tesla lawyer wrote to NHTSA a letter arguing that no US recall was necessary and blamed the driver for “ abuse ”for problems in China. NHTSA said in October that it is “monitoring the situation closely.”
Four days before Biden’s inauguration, NHTSA announced that defects in Tesla’s touch screen hardware could cause the car’s rear-view camera to turn off, among other problems. Instead of requesting a recall, NHTSA said it asked Tesla to voluntarily recall approximately 158,000 Model S and Model X cars for repair. On February 2, Tesla agreed to recall 135,000 of these cars.
Check out the full Los Angeles Times report, it is worth reading!