Do You Trust Musk and His Robotaxis to Keep Your Streets Safe?
Federal rules for self-driving cars will be helpful, but they shouldn’t be written with one company in mind.
A Tesla Cybercab prototype in San Jose, California.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Tesla Inc.’s market cap has soared back above $1 trillion since Donald Trump won the election. This hardly is owed to Trump’s affinity for electric vehicles; rather, a pervasive vibe that anything connected with Elon Musk, Trump’s new companion, stands to benefit. The most tangible potential benefit related to Tesla concerns autonomous vehicle development. This is the main reason to invest in Tesla, according to Musk, and Bloomberg News reports that Trump already has a team working on a “federal framework for self-driving vehicles.”
In one way, what Tesla could use is less of a framework. After years of complaints, court cases and crashes, regulators in Washington have stepped up scrutiny of the company’s robotaxi ambitions. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched another investigation of Tesla in October, this time on how well its advanced driver assistance system, dubbed Full Self-Driving, copes with reduced visibility. The Department of Justice has also reportedly looked into Tesla’s marketing of these systems. That Tesla has taken to calling FSD “Supervised Full Self-Driving” — a phrase with as much meaning as half-pregnancy — suggests it feels the pressure, as does Musk’s complaint of a campaign of “lawfare.”