NHTSA investigation lays bare AD challenge

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into Tesla’s FSD Level 2 advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) technology, in a move that casts further doubts over the ambitions of the US BEV maker and its CEO Elon Musk to roll out Level 4/5 autonomous driving (AD) next year.

The NHTSA’s office of defects investigation (ODI) has identified four reports in which a Tesla vehicle experienced a crash after entering an area of reduced roadway visibility conditions with FSD-Beta or FSD-Supervised engaged. In these crashes, the reduced roadway visibility arose from conditions such as sun glare, fog, or airborne dust.

In one of the crashes, the Tesla vehicle fatally struck a pedestrian. One additional crash in these conditions involved a reported injury. The ODI has opened a preliminary evaluation of FSD to assess:

— the ability of FSD’s engineering controls to detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions;

— whether any other similar FSD crashes have occurred in reduced roadway visibility conditions and, if so, the contributing circumstances for those crashes;

— any updates or modifications from Tesla to the FSD system that may affect the performance of FSD in reduced roadway visibility conditions.

The investigation is bad news for Tesla’s wider AD ambitions. And they underscore an EV inFocus view that Musk is both overly bullish and too combative in his AD rhetoric.

Consider his narrative at the launch of Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi concept earlier this month. “It will save lives, like a lot of lives, and prevent injuries. I think we will see autonomous cars become ten times safer than a human,” Musk opined.

Better is not enough

That is almost certainly true. According to the World Health Organisation close to 1.2mn deaths occur globally as the result of road traffic accidents, with a further 20-50mn people injured. The US makes up more than 40,000 of these.

But, crucially, the NHTSA does not open 40,000+ investigations annually into each of these fatalities. Whether Musk likes or not, and whether or not it is logical, ADAS and AD will be held to a higher standard than human error.

So when Musk says, as he did at Tesla’s Q2 results, “once we demonstrate that something is safe enough or significantly safer than human, we find that regulators are supportive of deployment of that capability”, it may not be entirely accurate. Regulators may be supportive, but only until something goes wrong.

“If you have got billions of miles that show that in the future unsupervised FSD is safer than human, what regulator could really stand in the way of that? They are morally obligated to approve,” Musk argues. He may find that regulators disagree on their moral obligations.