The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Tesla on August 19th, as Reuters first reported. The federal safety regulator is investigating Tesla for allegedly delaying mandatory reports for crashes involving its Autopilot driver-assistance features, including Full Self-Driving, the confusingly named system that is not legally self-driving.
“The Office of Defects Investigation (“ODI”) has identified numerous incident reports submitted by Tesla, Inc. (“Tesla”) in response to Standing General Order 2021-01 (the “SGO”), in which the reported crashes occurred several months or more before the dates of the reports. The majority of these reports involved crashes in which the Standing General Order in place at the time required a report to be submitted within one or five days of Tesla receiving notice of the crash,” a federal filing reviewed by InsideEVs said.
This is a potentially serious allegation, as Tesla has always faced scrutiny for its safety practices surrounding its driver-assistance features. I remember being yelled at by Tesla Public Relations way back in 2017—back when such a department was active—because already consumers believed that Tesla was selling autonomous cars. They are not, and no company sells a commercially available car that allows for eyes-off autonomy.
(The exception is if you are driving one of a few Mercedes products, on a highway, in Nevada or California, below around 40 mph and the weather is good; that’s so rare that it’s functionally irrelevant at the moment).
Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving are both considered “Level 2” driver-assistance features in the parlance favored by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Level 2 systems can assist the driver with the functions of operating the vehicle—including braking, steering and acceleration—but are never legally driving. They are assisting the inputs of a driver who is in legal control of the vehicle at all times.
Though a Chevy or Tesla may let you take your hands off the wheel, you must always pay attention, as you are legally driving the vehicle and responsible for preventing any mistakes or collisions.
Photo by: Chevrolet
This technical, but crucial detail, is the difference between a “hands-free highway assistance feature” like General Motors’ Super Cruise and a fully autonomous system, with no driver at all, like the one that operates Waymo’s autonomous taxis.
But Tesla operates a robotaxi pilot program and sells a driver-assistance system that both use the same hardware. It’s easy to see where consumers could get confused. Tesla, however, has long argued that any such lapses in judgment are made up for by the overwhelming safety of miles driven on Autopilot. By its own specific metrics, it says that Autopilot is safer than human driving, though it does not release enough data for independent experts to support that claim.
In general, it is guarded with information, and quick to blame drivers when incidents do occur. So the NHTSA probe is a serious inquiry into whether the company does intentionally slow-walk information that could damage the public perception of Full Self-Driving or Autopilot, and it’ll be interesting to see what the facts support. The filing says that Tesla claimed that it was a failure of its internal data collection systems, which has now been corrected. Sometimes corporations are simply bad at filing mandatory reports by incompetence, which is always the default assumption over malice.
Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com.
