On February 1, 2021, Robert Sumwalt, Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), wrote a letter to the sister institution, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), specifically criticizing Tesla and stating that NHTSA was neglecting its responsibility for autonomous driving safety.
The letter mentioned “Tesla” 16 times, and the NTSB pointed out that Tesla’s use of user public testing “FSD Beta” is an extremely unsafe practice.
This obviously added fuel to the fire for Tesla’s recent controversy over the safety of its assisted driving, after a Model Y in the driving process was suspected of identifying a truck as the sky and crashing into it. So why did the NTSB write to the NHTSA instead of responding directly to this incident? This is actually because the responsibilities of the two departments are different. The NTSB is mainly responsible for investigating vehicle accidents, while the NHTSA is responsible for technical standard development, crash testing, and recalls.
In addition, the NTSB also advocates that Tesla’s “FSD Beta” is only a Level 2 assisted driving technology, but it is marketed as having the ability for full autonomous driving. This suspicion is not unreasonable, because last week Tesla’s deputy general counsel sent an email to the California DMV stating that neither AP nor FSD is fully autonomous driving, and the current city road assisted driving tests will also be at the SAE L2 level.Currently, there is general confusion and uncertainty in both the industry and the market regarding autonomous driving, and much of this skepticism stems from the terminology used by various manufacturers to describe the limitations of their advanced driver assistance features. To most people, “partial autonomy” could mean completely hands-off driving in specific situations or hands-on driving with automated assistance. In any case, the definitions are broad and regulation is lax.
🔗Source: CNBC, Regulations.gov, Plainsite.org
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