Tesla has a lot riding on the swift success of its so-called Full Self-Driving software.

The TL;DR in one quote:

Job cuts at the US traffic safety regulator instigated by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency disproportionately hit staff assessing self-driving risks, hampering oversight of technology on which the world’s richest man has staked the future of Tesla.

An interesting quote from a Tesla manager:

“Letting Doge fire those in the autonomous division is sheer madness—we should be lobbying to add people to NHTSA,” said one manager at Tesla. They “need to be developing a national framework for AVs, otherwise Tesla doesn’t have a prayer for scale in FSD or robotaxis.”

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    My only quibble is: Great Depression 2.0, not Great Recession 2.0.

    This will be much, much worse than 07 08 09.

    Also IMO absolutely yes, Obama should have let the US auto industry collapse if they didn’t accept being completely nationalized.

    Play stupid games, win stuoid prizes.

    Thats how capitalism works, right, right?

    Oh wait no, its actually uh, bribe politicians to subsidize your inefficient and mismanaged business, and then also fund a bunch of PR to convince people that… that isn’t happening, that isn’t your business model.

    Instead we got basically this situation where US auto mfctrs are stupendously subsidized by the US gov… yet have no accountability to it in terms of high level, long term business strategy.

    That lead to all of C Suite just chasing as much profit as possible by basically just saying… fuck making a reliable cheapish car, everything is now a luxury priced giganto sized pavement princess with horrendous maintenance problems.

    If they’d accepted being nationalized, well then at least we would have kept actual ownership domestic, and the GAO could have just done audits on these entire companies and then everyone would know where all the mismanagement was going on. …

    Same thing with Boeing. Boeing is massively subsidized, is a near text book perfect example of how to do regulatory capture, and wow what a surprise, it was run in a manner to maximize balance sheets at the loss of fundamental ability to actually deliver a reliable product.