Elon Musk’s car company Tesla doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to road safety. In fact, a recent analysis of federal data came to the conclusion that Musk’s car company ranks highest in fatal crash incidents. We have this information because of a federal reporting rule that was instituted by the Biden administration several years ago, the purpose of which was to improve transparency surrounding the deployment of new autonomous technologies on America’s roadways. Unfortunately, now that Donald Trump is headed back to the White House, it seems increasingly likely that he will nix that rule, which would be a big win for Trump’s new political ally, Musk.
Reuters reported Friday that members of Trump’s transition team are recommending that he eliminate the car crash reporting requirement. Reuters is basing its reporting on a document that showed that the recommendation to kill the crash reporting rule came from “a transition team tasked with producing a 100-day strategy for automotive policy.” The group called the measure a mandate for “excessive” data collection. The fatal crash statistic cited above was also derived from an analysis of federal data conducted by Reuters. Getting rid of the reporting requirement has been a goal of the company for some time. Reuters reports:
In recent years, Tesla executives discussed with Musk the need to push for scrapping the crash-reporting requirement, according to one of the sources. But because Biden officials expressed enthusiasm for the program, Tesla executives ultimately concluded that they would need a change in administration to get rid of the requirements, according to the source.
Tesla finds the rules unfair because it believes it reports better data than other automakers, which makes it look like Tesla is responsible for an outsized number of crashes involving advanced driver-assistance systems, one of the sources said.
Reuters also quotes Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor, as saying that Tesla likely reports a “far greater proportion of their incidents” than other carmakers. However, critics contend that Tesla’s partially automated driving function, Full Self-Driving, could be the link between the high crash statistics that have dogged the car brand. The system is currently being investigated by the federal government.
Previous reports have found that Tesla ranks high when it comes to their involvement in fatal incidents. As previously stated, a recent analysis of NHTSA data arrived at the conclusion that Tesla has the highest rate of involvement in fatal accidents of any major brand. A 2022 report released by the NHTSA itself claimed that, in the preceding year, Teslas had accounted for some 70 percent of the car crashes that involved driver-assist systems. This year, the agency published another report that found that Tesla’s Autopilot function had a “critical safety gap” that could be linked to hundreds of crashes. A previous analysis of federal data published by the Washington Post showed that Tesla’s Autopilot function had been involved in 17 fatalities and as many as 736 crashes since 2019.
