What We’re Reading
Ford Will Use Tesla EV Charging, but That’s Only Part of the Story (Car and Driver, May 26, 2023)
Ford and Tesla surprised everyone last week when they announced a new partnership to make the Tesla Supercharger network available to Ford drivers. “[T]he two companies' CEOs jointly announced that future Ford EVs will incorporate the Tesla connector from 2025, and current Ford EV owners will have access to Superchargers starting in spring 2024 via a CCS-to-Tesla connector.” Read more on the details of the announcement, and its implications for the industry, here and here (both from CNBC).
According to this Car and Driver author, the partnership is “a brilliant move on Ford’s part,” as it gives Ford a market advantage (except vis-à-vis Tesla) and some flexibility in future manufacturing decisions, while putting pressure on other U.S. charging networks to step up their game. Tesla also stands to benefit from a revenue perspective.
Tesla leak reportedly shows thousands of Full Self-Driving safety complaints (The Verge, May 25, 2023)
Citing 100GB of data leaked by one or more unidentified “insiders,” the German business paper Handelsblatt is reporting that Tesla has received “thousands of complaints that raise serious concerns about the safety” of the automaker’s FSD features. Specifically, between 2015 and 2022, Tesla drivers in the United States, Europe, and Asia have “reported over 2,400 self-acceleration issues and 1,500 braking problems, including 139 reports of ‘unintentional emergency braking’ and 383 reports of ‘phantom stops’ from false collision warnings.”
Perhaps even more concerning, the leak includes information on Tesla policies that require collision data to be kept “under wraps,” cautioning technical reviewers to avoid releasing data in writing even to the customer and to note if “involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented.”
According to a separate report from Quartz, the data leak could present significant legal problems for Tesla and lead to large fines, as it “included customer bank details, the salaries of 100,000 Tesla employees, and information about Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s personal vehicle and even his social security number.”
Tesla has not commented on the data, but has demanded that the newspaper delete it. The original report can be found here [translate to English].
Self-driving delivery trucks are already on North Texas highways. How safe are they? (Fort Worth Star Telegram, May 30, 2023)
Lured by loose regulations and a central geographic location, key players in the race to market reliable and scalable autonomous trucking technology are finding North Texas to be a preferred testing ground. Big names like Volvo, Aurora, TuSimple, Einride, and Gatik are testing autonomous fleets at AllianceTexas, where the “Mobility Innovation Zone” allows for the testing, scaling, and commercialization of new driverless technologies. For its part, Google subsidiary Waymo is testing self-driving trucks on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston, while California-based Kodiak Robotics is testing a self-driving fleet out of Dallas.
But not everyone is convinced this proliferation of testing on open roadways is safe. Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been working on self-driving car safety for more than 25 years, cautioned that the financial pressures of the industry might lead to situations in which “even the best leadership might find themselves with pressure to deploy even if they’re not ready. That’s a tough position to be in.” Koopman added that, despite industry claims, there is no real data to support the widely held belief that autonomous trucks are safer than human drivers: “They could be safer—I’d be delighted if they were—but we don’t know. ... We can’t set policies assuming they’re safer, because there’s no data.”
Still, despite the current lack of safety consensus, Koopman acknowledges that the drastic labor shortage in the trucking industry alone is a legitimate reason to continue pursuing commercially viable autonomous technology.