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Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The NHTSA doesn’t actually certify anything.

They write the standards that vehicles and products must follow, but it’s up to the manufacturers to certify themselves as being compliant.

This explains how the cyber trucks, with no third party testing, are considered road legal in the US and basically no other country.

So Elon is not firing regulators that will deny his cars a certification, he’s firing regulators that decide what the requirements will be.

Thats so much worse.

Source for anyone interested. It’s a reply to a man wanting to import air bags, but the letter does give a nice overview of the laws.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The Cybertruck doesn't violate any US laws, there's nothing to disallow it, and independent testing gave it 5 star saftey rating.

And while OEMs do self certify, they get spot checked to ensure compliance. There's too many new vehicles and variants for the NHSTA/EPA etc. to ever check every single one in detail.

Edit: and if you really wanna get into it, most of the other OEMs everyone wants to love actually put defeat devices for said spot checking to lie and kill us sooner with bad air for $$$

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I’d love to see self certification go away entirely. They do the same thing with motorcycle helmets.

NHTSA does not approve helmets, or any other motor vehicle equipment, instead relying on a self-certification process. However, we conduct tests on some helmets to make sure they meet our standard.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

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.