It’s happening too often. Someone sees one Owner of Tesla sleeping while driving on the highway, his car under the control of Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system. The next thing you know is that it goes through social media.
You may be wondering how Tesla was able to launch this product on the public road. Are there any regulations covering these functions? Not a security issue? According to one report of the Los Angeles Times, it really breaks with government oversight.
The Trump administration focused its efforts on reducing fuel economy requirements. His arguments for doing so were that cars would be cheaper and safer. That didn’t happen, and it’s a mystery why Trump thought he would. One explanation is I didn’t know car shit.
Unfortunately, fuel efficiency and emission control were pretty much the only things Trump’s NHTSA managed to do. The NHTSA’s important regulatory oversight work stalled for four years without any director at the helm. Now, the Biden administration has a backlog of abandoned tasks to explore. Like the Times report shows, NHTSA has been pretty practical when it comes to driver assistance systems, specifically when it comes to Tesla’s autopilot, which cheats:
Officially, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration discourages this behavior, as it conducted a public awareness campaign last fall with the hashtag #YourCarNeedsYou. But its messaging is competing with the marketing of Tesla itself, which recently said it will begin selling a software package for “Full Self Driving,” a term it has used since 2016 despite criticism and warnings from the company’s own small print. subscription base from this quarter.
The fact that the NHTSA has refused to confront Tesla directly with the issue has a strong character for an agency that took a practical approach on a wide range of issues under the Trump administration.
“Inactive,” is how Carla Bailo, chief executive of the Automotive Research Center, summed up the previous four years of NHTSA. “Inactive,” said Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. “No direction,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor and expert in autonomous vehicle law at the University of South Carolina.
The agency passed Trump’s full term without a Senate-confirmed administrator, who left deputies at the helm. He began several safety investigations into Tesla and other companies, but left most unfinished. “A massive pile of delays” awaits the Biden administration, ”said Paul Eisenstein, editor of the Detroit Office of Industry news site.
Although NHTSA has been absent on several issues, its lack of autonomous driving oversight is perhaps the greatest. The Times says Level 2 autonomy is the biggest security challenge since Ralph Nader Insecure at any speed. Aside from Nader’s silly references, the Times has a point.
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 raises alarms to experts.
Whoever is in charge must balance the long-term potential of next-generation cars to reduce pollution, traffic and greenhouse gases against the short-term risks of deploying new technologies on a large scale before they are fully verified . In the style of “moving fast and breaking things” in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has taken these risks.
While other driverless car developers (from General Motors’ Cruise, to Ford’s Argo AI, to Amazon’s Zoox, to Alphabet’s Waymo, to independent Aurora and more), all adopting an incremental and slow deployment approach with professional test drivers behind the wheel, Tesla is “beta testing” its driverless technology on the public road by using its customers as test drivers.
Musk said last month that Tesla cars will be able to be driven completely without human intervention on the public road later this year. He has been making similar promises since 2016. No driverless car expert or car industry leader outside of Tesla has 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 its software, “that doesn’t excuse marketing, because this is by no means autonomous.There are so many bad things in this term.It is ridiculous.If we cannot 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 ? “
The Eisenstein of the Detroit Office is even tougher. “Can I say this off the record?” He said. “No, let me tell you on the record. I am dismayed by Tesla. They’re taking the smartphone approach – put the technology out there and find out if it works or not. It’s one thing to release a new iOS that would cause problems with voice dictation. Another thing is to have a problem moving them 60 kilometers per hour.
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An NHTSA directive in late 2016 under the Obama administration considered “predictable abuse”As a potential flaw in the deployment of autonomous driving technology. Unfortunately, under Trump, the NHTSA did nothing. By context, the directive came about a year after the release of software that allowed autopilot assistance to the Tesla Model S.
NHTSA’s inaction sparked outrage from another federal safety agency, the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB – best known for its investigations into plane and train incidents – blamed predictable abuses a 2018 accident where a Tesla Model X collided with a concrete divider.
Part of the problem is the lack of transparency of Musk and Tesla regarding the safety of the autopilot driver assistance system, 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 human-only cars. It 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 make even anonymized data available to researchers university students for independent confirmation. Tesla could not be reached: last year it dissolved 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 alleged defective cooling pipes that could cause leaks. At the time, the agency did not make public the information it had about leak-prone battery cooling pipes that were installed in the early versions of the Model S and Model X.
Since late 2016, many Tesla drivers have been complaining about the “whompy wheels” of their cars: a tendency for the suspension system to break, which sometimes caused the wheel to collapse or fall out of the car. . Chinese drivers filed similar complaints, and last October, Chinese authorities ordered the removal of 30,000 Model S and Model X vehicles. A Tesla lawyer wrote a letter to NHTSA arguing that the withdrawal of the cars was not necessary. United States and accused the driver of “abuse” of the problems in China. NHTSA said in October that it was “closely monitoring the situation”.
Four days before the opening of Biden, NHTSA announced that defects in Tesla’s touch screen hardware could cause the car’s rearview camera to go blank, among other issues. Instead of ordering a recall, NHTSA said it asked Tesla to voluntarily remove approximately 158,000 Model S and Model X vehicles for repair. On February 2, Tesla agreed to recover 135,000 of these cars.
Check out the full Los Angeles Times report, worth reading!