What We’re Reading
August 17, 2022
Ralph Nader urges regulators to recall Tesla’s ‘manslaughtering’ Full Self-Driving vehicles (The Verge, August 10, 2022)
Consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader is targeting Tesla’s Full Self Driving Beta, characterizing its launch as “one of the most dangerous and irresponsible actions by a car company in decades” and calling on federal regulators to issue a recall.
Nader’s call to action follows NHTSA’s upgraded probe into sixteen crashes involving Teslas and emergency vehicles; the California DMV’s administrative action accusing Tesla of deceptively marketing its vehicles’ capabilities through terms such as “Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving;” and Senators Markey and Blumenthal’s request to the FTC to investigate Tesla’s advertising—all discussed in this article.
Nader’s complete statement on FSD can be found here.
Tesla Full Self-Driving effort faces mounting pressure from many fronts (Electrek, August 12, 2022)
U.S. Senator Gary Peters and Representative Jan Schakowsky have sent a letter to NHTSA urging it to step up its Tesla investigations and raising questions about the administration’s ability to address safety issues with automated driving more generally.
After outlining several well-reported Tesla safety concerns, Peters and Schakowsky requested a briefing from NHTSA on various issues including whether NHTSA has “the authorities and resources it needs to evaluate and enforce the safety of emerging technologies including ADAS,” how NHTSA evaluates “the risk of ‘automation complacency’ by a human operator in ADAS defect investigations,” and whether NHTSA shares the legislators’ “concern that a mismatch between consumers’ expectations and the limitations of these technologies could reduce consumer confidence in life-saving capabilities that will be deployed over the long term.”
As the article notes, “coincidently, or not, those new efforts to pressure regulators to shut down Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Beta comes after Dan O’Dowd released a new ad attacking Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta.” O’Dowd is the Senate candidate running on an exclusively anti-Tesla platform. The referenced ad, which is linked in the article, purports to show a Tesla in FSD mode running down a child-sized mannequin; however, this article also notes that “there are some serious problems with the tests that led to this ad” (namely, FSD does not appear to be activated at the time of impact).
Problematic or not, the O’Dowd ad went viral, prompting copy-cat experiments and even, apparently, at least one ill-advised threat from an FSD superfan to re-create the experiment using a real child. As one editor at The Verge wrote in an open letter response, “don’t do that.”
Tesla Reportedly Wins Autopilot & FSD Marketing Lawsuit in Germany (InsideEVs, August 15, 2022)
Even as its marketing comes under greater scrutiny in the U.S., Tesla reportedly has won an appeal in Germany in a lawsuit challenging its use of the term “Autopilot” there.
“The Competition Center, a highly influential German regulatory agency, along with several other companies, insisted that Tesla's consumers were being misinformed when they were told that Autopilot was included in every Tesla vehicle since Autopilot suggests that the cars could drive themselves. Taking it a step further, the group went to bat against Tesla's FSD since the automaker’s website noted that the cars were capable of ‘automatic driving in town.’”
According to this article, following this final appeal, Tesla will be able to continue using the term “Autopilot” “since anyone visiting Tesla’s website can learn that its vehicles aren’t fully autonomous.” Tesla will need to make some revisions to its website, including to specify when a new feature is expected to launch.
Read the original German report on Tesla’s victory here (using Google translator for an English version).