On March 10, electric car maker Tesla insisted in a letter to two senators not long ago that the company’s driver assistance system Autopilot and its upgraded “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) feature are safe enough. Senators, however, did not appear to be convinced, saying Tesla was evading and distorting the facts.
Rohan Patel, Tesla’s senior director of public policy, wrote to U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Ed Markey on March 4, he wrote: ” Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features enhance our users’ ability to drive even more safely than the average American driver.”
In the letter, Patel outlined Autopilot and FSD more cautiously than Musk’s tweets and other public comments. For example, on a recent earnings call, Musk claimed that by the end of 2022, FSDs will be safer than human drivers. Patel didn’t mention a date, but he insisted that Tesla’s advanced driver assistance features are indeed safer than human drivers.
For example, Patel said: “In the fourth quarter of 2021, there will be one traffic accident every 6.94 million kilometers of Tesla vehicles with Autopilot activated, and the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows that the United States An average domestic vehicle travels 780,000 kilometers before an accident occurs .”
Tesla occasionally publishes safety reports that echo the data in an effort to market Autopilot as a safer system than human drivers. But experts point out that the data is largely meaningless because Autopilot is primarily used for highway driving. Tesla gains an unfair advantage over national statistics that include a variety of driving environments, including residential and urban driving.
Patel went on to describe Tesla’s driver monitoring system, which uses torque sensors on the steering wheel and cockpit cameras to monitor driver behavior. However, he did not mention that regulators and safety experts have been asking Tesla to add better driver monitoring systems to its cars for years. Musk even admitted that the crashes involving Autopilot stemmed from complacency, and he rejected requests from his engineers to add more monitoring to the company’s cars, calling the technology “ineffective.”
However, companies such as General Motors and Ford currently sell cars with camera-based eye-tracking systems designed to keep drivers focused when using hands-free driving features.
If Patel’s letter was to allay Blumenthal and Markey’s concerns about Tesla’s commitment to safety, it doesn’t appear to have worked. In a joint statement, the senators said: “Tesla is more about dodging and misrepresenting the facts. Despite its troubling safety record and fatal crashes, the company appears to want business as usual. Tesla The message is long overdue: obey the law and put safety first.”
Given Tesla is consistently seen as one of the safest cars on the market, the senators have yet to provide data to prove the company has a “disturbing safety record and responsibility for fatal crashes.” Some of the many accidents involving Tesla vehicles have been blamed on Autopilot, but ultimately it turned out to be a human error by the driver. However, Tesla had not responded to Blumenthal and Markey’s comments as of this writing.
Tesla is currently rolling out the FSD Beta program, allowing vehicles to drive autonomously on city streets. Now, the program has about 60,000 users across the United States.