Unhappy Days in Tesla-Land

Tesla (and other self driving car companies) have been particularly close-mouthed about crashes, especially when their cars are in self driving mode.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a new rule that pulls the covers off of that secrecy.

Now companies will have to report ALL crashes in which semi-autonomous, steering assist or automatic lane-keeping are involved. Not only does this affect Tesla, but it also affects Waymo, Zoox, Cruise and others.

The new rule says that any crash involving a semi-autonomous system and “a hospital-treated injury, a fatality, a vehicle tow-away, an air bag deployment, or a vulnerable road user such as a pedestrian or bicyclist” must be reported to NHTSA within one day of learning about the crash, with an update submitted 10 days later.

The companies also have to generate monthly reports and provide them to the NHTSA.

To encourage companies to comply, failure to comply will subject companies to fines of $22, 992 per day.

With a maximum fine of $100 million.

I assume that will get even Elon’s attention.

The objective is for the feds to have more data to understand how safe or not some of this new tech is.

Credit: Vice

by