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.”
I’d love to see self certification go away entirely. They do the same thing with motorcycle helmets.
They release reports about those checks and a guy online aggregates them and they have a 43.9% failure rate as of 2023. With helmets we can just grab something with the DOT rating and one of the other ratings that aren’t self certified.
Yikes that’s a bad rate.
It would be nice to get rid of it, but it will cost a lot more money that no one wants to pay even if it’s actually a good use of it.