The NHTSA launches new probe into adequacy of 2-million vehicle recall in December, after discovering more crashes linked to Tesla’s Full Self Drive FSD.
Another FSD Probe
The Wall Street Journal reports U.S. Regulators Tie Tesla’s Autopilot to More than a Dozen Fatalities, Hundreds of Crashes
Federal auto-safety regulators have opened an investigation into the adequacy of Tesla’s December recall of 2 million vehicles equipped with Autopilot software, tying the technology to at least 14 fatalities, several dozen injuries and hundreds of crashes.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a report published Friday that its examination of Tesla’s Autopilot, a driver-assist system that automates some driving tasks, uncovered a trend of “avoidable crashes involving hazards that would have been visible to an attentive driver.”
On Friday, the regulator said it was closing its earlier probe and opening the new one into the adequacy of the recall remedy, which was deployed through a software update. The recall in December was among Tesla’s largest to date and involved nearly all the vehicles it had sold in the U.S.
NHTSA also compared Autopilot to similar systems deployed by auto-industry rivals, saying it found Tesla’s approach was an “industry outlier.” The agency said the Autopilot name “elicits the idea of drivers not being in control,” while other systems use terms like “assist” or “team” to imply that active supervision is required.
In its latest report, NHTSA took issue with Tesla’s statements that a portion of the recall remedy required opt-in from the owner and could be reversed at the driver’s discretion. It also said some Tesla updates appeared to address Autopilot issues that the NHTSA raised without identifying them as remedies.
“This investigation will consider why these updates were not a part of the recall or otherwise determined to remedy a defect that poses an unreasonable safety risk,” the agency said.
Since the Autopilot update was rolled out, regulators have received an unusually high number of complaints about changes made to the controls. Some drivers say warnings have become excessive and are triggered when performing routine tasks.
Recall Created New Problems
The Tesla recall did not address any existing problems but did create new ones.
The Verge has additional comments.
In 59 crashes examined by NHTSA, the agency found that Tesla drivers had enough time, “five or more seconds,” prior to crashing into another object in which to react. In 19 of those crashes, the hazard was visible for 10 or more seconds before the collision. Reviewing crash logs and data provided by Tesla, NHTSA found that drivers failed to brake or steer to avoid the hazard in a majority of the crashes analyzed.
“Crashes with no or late evasive action attempted by the driver were found across all Tesla hardware versions and crash circumstances,” NHTSA said.
“A comparison of Tesla’s design choices to those of L2 peers identified Tesla as an industry outlier in its approach to L2 technology by mismatching a weak driver engagement system with Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities,” the agency said.
Even the brand name “Autopilot” is misleading, NHTSA said, conjuring up the idea that drivers are not in control. While other companies use some version of “assist,” “sense,” or “team,” Tesla’s products lure drivers into thinking they are more capable than they are. California’s attorney general and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles are both investigating Tesla for misleading branding and marketing.
NHTSA acknowledges that its probe may be incomplete based on “gaps” in Tesla’s telemetry data. That could mean there are many more crashes involving Autopilot and FSD than what NHTSA was able to find.
Sels Driving When?
On July 6, 2023, Elon Musk said Tesla will have ‘level 4 or 5’ self-driving this year
Every year since 2016 he has promised to deliver a vehicle capable of going cross country without a drive.
More Elon Musk Vaporware
On April 8, I commented Tesla’s Robotaxi August Launch Will Be More Elon Musk Vaporware
Expect to hear more promises, always a year away.
Elon Musk will make an announcement on robotaxis on August 8. Tesla lags Waymo so badly that Musk is not even near the ballpark.
Tesla Rebounds On Musk Promises With No Details
After a dismal first quarter and a stock market plunge of 40 percent this year, I commented on April 24, Tesla Rebounds On Musk Promises With No Details, It Won’t Stick
Musk said that the new models would come “early 2025 if not late this year.” Beyond that, though, he gave few details, pointedly declining to answer analysts’ questions on the topic during the call.
Refusal to provide details means one thing: Musk has no details to offer.
The name Full Self Drive is a blatant lie. If you do a string of searches on who is ahead in driverless technology, you can find any answer you want.
But if you compare levels of autonomy, Waymo is level 4, driverless.
Despite the name FSD, Tesla says your hands need to be on the wheel. Tesla is level 2, far behind Waymo in capability.
Systems used to be designed to be fail-safe. If they couldn’t be, they were not used.
My Mazda’s auto collision detection false activated, stopping us dead in our tracks on the expressway with no one in front of us. Thankfully there was no one behind us either. These technologies are generally unreliable and therefore useless
Glad I stayed clear of buying a tesla. It always seemed like it was the Microsoft windows 3.1 of the electric car era.
The good news is if the people at my office who use this feature get into a severe car crash, then a few of us at.work will get promotions and raises. Never let an opportunity go to waste.
“Never let an opportunity go to waste”.
Rahm can have a fling in the rumble seat.
Fast Eddy’s Strategy for Getting Promoted:
Funny how the media didn’t used to report on Tesla’s issues since Tesla is part of the green revolution. I suspect we will read about many more “investigations” now that Musk owns twitter and isn’t afraid to speak truth to power.
Exxon paid a registration fee to green political groups, and got itself reclassified as ESG and climate friendly (then the CEO put a stop to paying extortion money).
Tesla / X / SpaceX stopped paying extortion money, and got reclassified as not ESG friendly.
Its about corruption and extortion and political protection money.
Tesla is the same company it always was, selling the same glorified golf carts.
SpaceX has largely been spared the extortion media coverage because the military needs ISR satellites, and NASA is infested with typical government employees.
The media is killing EVs before they become too much of a burden on the grid resulting in brown outs and black outs on a massive scale.
Those coal and gas charged contraptions suck a LOT of electricity (coal and gas generated of course)
The Cybertruck has all sorts of issues as well. Sharp edges on doors and the auto closing hatch. No pinch sensor on the hatch = bye bye fingers.
Accelerator pedals falling off causing the pedal to become jammed while driving.
Software and electronic issues resulting in the truck becoming a brick.
Tesla is supposed to be known for thier engineering, but it’s clear the engineers were out to lunch when designing the cyber truck.
All hype……
Whenever I see a Tesla on the road I try to pull up beside them and peek in to see who is driving … just to see what a moron looks like. Sometimes I get to see an entire family of morons.
They usually have smug looks on their faces… cuz they feel superior when they pull up to the hipster coffee shop to imbibe fair trade organic coffee (flown in overnight on a private jet from a small village in Ethiopia)
Tesla uses the same software as SpaceX Starship. Only the Starship has the whole solar system for itself.
No government agency is safe from lying or trying to destroy someone like Elon Musk who allows a measure of free speech and the truth.
hahahaha… Elon is a tool of those fellas… he’s fake. Kinda like in the matrix … remember how they offered the guy whatever he wanted… rock star… movie star … whatever… so long as he turned on his mates
This needs to be all or nothing. If autopilot doesn’t always work, it should be prohibited.
People don’t always work when driving, as witnessed by the annual killed in auto accidents total of ~41,000.
So what’s the problem if a relatively few Tesla drivers die? Someone has to test the technology [shrug].
Eventually, once the bugs are ironed out, this technology will enable fully autonomous cars w/o steering wheels, gas or brake pedals.
If they only killed themselves, I might agree.
My comment on 41k annual auto deaths in the USA alone applies to your comment equally. How many of the 41k are killed by OTHER human drivers?
just a few years ago the avg was 60K/yr
Progress!!
Yes… that will happen soon … in DelusiSTAN
Cruise control is nice.
We will be at least into the next millennium, before “autopilot” will “always” work in the current traffic environment.
Most likely, it never will, since it is such a trivially idiotic pursuit to begin with,
Instead, full, no override controls autonomy will be implemented in an environment where all vehicles are autonomous. And where each vehicle is designed to behave in a manner entirely predictable to every other vehicle. Without this sort of global (or at least very-wide-local dependent on how buffers are implemented, there can be no “always work.”
As for Waymo: Environment simplification is their thing. They are desperately trying to find the simplest possible environmental niche in which their vehicles can still provide enough value to possibly be; per almost comically Pollyanna’ish standards; viable.
Pulling the steering controls out of NYC copcars which may be tasked with engaging in running gun battles through Manhattan rush hour, is so insanely far away from anything they have any intention of accomplishing in foreseeable time, that it’s not even worth mentioning. And, until the NYPD can be convinced to switch: There are, in aggregate, at least as many corner case scenarios faced by private drivers as police departments. Likely many, many more. IOW: Nothing particularly special,nor unusually difficult, about a mere running gunbattle scenario.
At the opposite end, mining trucks working closed off mining sites are already fairly successful at autonomous operation. Ditto commercial airplanes in mid flight. IOW: It’s nearly ALL primarily a function of operating environment restriction. Not pie-in-the-sky R2D2 silliness.
If autopilot were used on private roads such as mining sites and maybe farms, I wouldn’t be against it, but it should not be enabled on public roads. As far as overrides go, that works for airliners for a variety of reasons, but it’s a very different kettle of fish for vehicles on public roads in the real world.
“And where each vehicle is designed to behave in a manner entirely predictable to every other vehicle.”
Black ice, deer jumping out in front you, (heaven forbid it’s a moose) patches of loose sand, tire blowouts on a curve; the list of cases you have to design for gets large quickly even on the highway.
Yup.
Which is why you won’t see anything even close to “driverless” operation until vehicles are much closer locked in to their environment than is currently the case. On rails, with power provided by the infrastructure, and likely where derailing/lane swithcing is handled by the infrastructure as well, is where and how they will be implemented. And still with sizable safety buffers allowing intermittent failures to be contained within a reasonable area.
Another thing you’ll see; in the real world of competent people actually working on such things, even if not in the idiots-only world populated by hucksters and Fed enriched illiterate “investor” classes: Is driverless vehicles being tasked with hauling cargo only for a long, long time before humans are added to the mix. Cargo is where the savings are: If you’re going to haul a human anyway, the marginal gain from him twiddling thumbs instead of driving, is limited. Not so with cargo, where the cost of keeping the human driver safe and sharp and rested and fed and remunerated, as often as not is what drives the cost of moving a container. Even more so, subcontainer loads.
So: Once/if all available capital stops being stolen and handed to negative-intelligence, fully Fed dependent, child brains only; by debasement and other transfers; such that adults once again can command some resources: What you’ll see is increasingly ambitious attempts to shift cargo autonomously on segregated-from-current-roads networks. Initially most likely in China, which is where matters these days. They’re the ones with resources enabling them to do big stuff. As well as the ones with cargo to shift.
But other places as well: Almost all “stable” regions face rapidly declining populations. Supplier networks aren’t going to get any simpler. Wasting prime grade human brains on moving a container down a road, is not going to get any more efficient.
Then, only once routing schemes,hardware and infrastructures are VERY WELL vetted shifting cargo, will meaningful attempts to expand to more precious human cargo commence. You’d, literally, have to be as dumb as a Fed enriched Wall Street monkey, to not realize that.
Puh-leeze. There will always be esoteric examples.
In my 50 years of driving, I’ve only had a deer jump in front of my car exactly one time and that was about 18 months ago. Missed him though. Had I hit it, I would have thrown it in the car if it was still running and took it home for butchering.
Waymo is “driving” autonomous taxi cars in SF and San Mateo counties in CA without a monitor driver.
And they’re not working anywhere near well enough to be viable even at that. Despite being given near infinitely more leeway than the average Uber stoner.
Furthermore: Progress has largely stopped. Just as was the case with Tesla’s autopilot, as well as Asimo; and for that matter Minskys “experts”: Early gains were quick, easy and made everything look promising. Then…….: Well, just try getting the NYPD SWAT to trade in their drivers…. By now, for every little gain, the cliffwall of complexity gets steeper. And it’s already nearly vertical to a height halfway to Andromeda.
Chances are: A long, long, long, long time into the future; assuming the Taliban or someone don’t cock it up too badly once they take over from the current resource-controlling retard-regimes: Vastly more advanced biologists will recognize that the reason biological based life is not coexisting with electronic life, is that the latter is fundamentally too inefficient beyond a certain level of complexity. And simply couldn’t hack it, in competition with biological rivals.
Either way: Long before that question is settled: The way “we” can gain efficiency by automation of currently manual processes, is by walling off and restricting the complexity of the subsystem to be automated. That’s how we got smoothly flowing traffic, standardized containers, worldwide internet communication and all the rest. And that’s how we’ll get any further advancements as well.
“And they’re not working anywhere near well enough to be viable even at that.”
Cite? I won’t hold my breath.
My sarcastic prediction:
Musk will take a huge drag off the current spliff and then spin this as a feature and not a bug.
Adds to the GDP through associated car/property repairs and lessens climate change catalyst CO2 by reducing population or something along those lines.
TSLA jumps 5% on the news as Cathie Wood raves about ARK buying even more…
The name Inflation Reduction Act is a blatant lie.
There is a crying need for simpler, basic and affordable new gas powered vehicles.
Not going to happen. Just leafed through my Subaru manual. It has a feature to congratulate me on birthday if set. On a Subaru…
Competition in idiocracy, my dear.
link to polaris.com
they work fine on the road too.
I’d take a new 30 year old model from several of the brands. Let the kids keep the video game dashboard and controls.
Yes. One of the reasons that auto insurance rates are out of control is that with all the complex electronics there is more to break – and it is difficult to diagnose… $$$$ to fix them
WE LIVE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF FRAUD
and the government/regulators are all part of it. No courage. No fight. No right/wrong. No enforcement of the law. Its all a fraud and a farce. Just “go along to get along”
Short Tesla down to its true value under $30. There’s your investment idea PD
How did you arrive at $30? Show your “work.” By the way, I am neither long nor short TSLA including through derivatives. Its been a while since I looked, but Teslas GAA earnings and cash flows justified a higher stock rice a while back. The issue, of course, is that the value of stock stock is the discount of future cash flows.
I am in no way a Tesloid, either with respect to the products or the shares, but I seriously doubt you have done any actual work on the valuation. From what I have read lately, their issue is that their models are aging, the Cybertruck is iffy at best, and they have yet to update their line past that. Looks to me that they are at something of a crossroads.
Tesla had a bad quarter, no doubt about that, but they still had positive GAAP earnings and positive operating cash flow. Their gross margin on car sales was 18.4% vs.19.8% year over year. They ain’t going out of business any time soon, kids.
Tesla’s margins on EVs are still double the margins for the ICEV makers. I expect that to compress, but if they fix their problems (which they have a history of doing), there’s plenty of life left at the company.
Same for Ford, by the way. Gross margin was 9.4%, and they made money and had positive operating cash flow. Do any commenters here actually look at the Ks and Qs before going all epileptic in the swimming pool? Sure doesn’t seem like it.
The doom and gloom here is the mirror image of the EVangelism elsewhere. Get a grip!
Tesla is a car company (normal PE of 6-10) with a bubbled tech shitco PE of 50ish the last time I looked at it.
With a PE on par with massively larger and massively more established car companies, you get a stock price for TSLA below $30
It’s simple really
You save on insurance, repairs, time, resale value, and operating costs if you buy a gas guzzler.
Even the maintenance isn’t as bad as it use to be.
It’s time for another Hard-hitting Congressional Hearing. Followed up by FREE LUNCH, TOP-END SCOTCH and BACK SLAPPING!