Recall of self-driving Tesla cars doesn’t go far enough. California must take action
California’s Office of Traffic Safety needs to do what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration so far failed to achieve: Keep Californians safe from Tesla’s flawed Full Self-driving beta software.
A nationwide recall of 362,758 Tesla vehicles equipped with Full Self-driving, or FSD, software didn’t go far enough. Worse, NHTSA has been handling Tesla with kid gloves.
Specifically, the recall indicated that the software may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections, such as traveling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane; entering a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming to a complete stop; or proceeding into an intersection during a steady yellow traffic signal without due caution. The vehicle may respond insufficiently to changes in posted speed limits. And the FSD software does not adequately account for the driver’s adjustment of the vehicle’s speed to exceed posted speed limits.
Still, numerous issues remain with the recall:
– Teslas with FSD software are still on the road, and the company hasn’t even asked owners to turn the software off and not use it.
– Tesla has said it will deliver its fix for the defects remotely, but hasn’t provided details about how or when that will be done.
– For its part, NHTSA hasn’t given Tesla a deadline to make the fixes.
– Moreover, neither NHTSA nor Tesla has put a review process in place to guarantee the software fixes are effective.
– In fact, Tesla’s software update could actually exacerbate problems in the code or even lead to other unintended effects. (As a software developer myself, I’m painfully aware that glitches can cascade in unpredictable ways.)
California deserves better. If NHTSA is going to allow Tesla to soft pedal the dangerous flaws in its FSD beta software, California’s OTS needs to act with fast, decisive courage.
The state already helped lead the way toward holding Tesla accountable with the passage of state Sen. Lena Gonzalez’s Senate Bill 1398, which took effect in January. The new law essentially bans Tesla from advertising its vehicles as Full Self-driving.
A Tesla shareholder lawsuit filed in late February created even more momentum to hold Tesla accountable, accusing the company, Elon Musk, et al., of making false and misleading claims about Tesla’s self-driving capabilities.
NHTSA only negotiated the voluntary recall with Tesla after a Super Bowl TV ad, sponsored by The Dawn Project, criticized NHTSA’S continued inaction. The commercial showed what happened when we put Tesla’s FSD to the test, and the results were alarming.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for selfdriving vehicles. I believe they’re the wave of the future for an efficient transportation system. In fact, I happily own several Teslas – but I don’t rely on their faulty FSD capability.
California has served as an incubator for self-driving vehicle technology. You can’t walk or drive down the streets of San Francisco, for example, without seeing them in action.
Instead, as the Ohio Capital Journal’s Marilou Johanek put it, we got “opportunists exploiting East Palestine’s suffering population with politics and race-baiting.” In this telling, it wasn’t corporate or government corruption that caused the suffering in East Palestine. It was “wokeness.”
Fox host Tucker
Carlson proclaimed that East Palestine was affected because it “is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative.” As writer Greg Sargent summarized, Carlson alleged the administration would have cared more “if the accident had happened in Philadelphia or Detroit — wink, wink.”
“If this train derailment happened in downtown Atlanta in the densely populated Black neighborhoods,” agreed far-right activist Charlie Kirk, “this would be the number-one news story.” The millionaire talk-show host insisted that our leaders “hate working-class
whites,” and, in fact, there’s a whole “crusade against white people.”
Fox talking head Jesse Waters played a similar note, asking this about Michael Regan, President Joe Biden’s Black EPA administrator: “Is this his idea of fighting environmental racism? Spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people in Ohio?”
Donald Trump Jr., for his part, denigrated Treasury Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “the gay guy.”
This is the “war on woke” sham in a nutshell.
Well-heeled politicians and millionaire MAGA media figures tell poor whites to blame Black people, LGBTQ people, and vague liberal ideas for troubles any sensible person would blame on a greedy corporation and the bought-off politicians — from the Gop-run
Ohio statehouse on up to the White House — who enabled it.
Even while lambasting Biden, they had little to say about his bad decision to snub the railroad unions,
perhaps because most Republicans — many flush with railroad cash — supported that, too. The only beneficiaries are the bad actors who poisoned the poor Ohio community these pundits claim to represent from their perches in New York or Washington.
They play the same game all over.
Right-wing politicians rail against “woke corporations” only to collect corporate campaign cash, push corporate tax cuts, and oppose minimum wage hikes, sick leave, and union organizing. They ban books about race and viciously attack LGBTQ kids to protect education while systematically underfunding schools.
A self-described “antiwoke budget” drafted by former Trump officials would cut the “woke” Environmental Protection Agency by 30%. What a gift to East Palestine, where the EPA is doing emergency cleanup operations.
This hateful, fact-free rhetoric is doing incredible damage.
It spreads cruel and dangerous ANTI-LGBTQ laws. It’s gutting classroom libraries. It’s led to absurd conspiracy theories, an emboldened and violent white supremacist fringe, and the Jan. 6 coup attempt. It divides urban and rural communities of every race and color who might otherwise work together against influential people who do them wrong.
In court, a lawyer for
Gov. Ron Desantis of Florida recently defined “woke” as the “general belief in systemic injustices in the country.” Ask yourself: Why would a powerful politician want to banish that belief?
Instead, the MAGA bargain for Middle America goes something like this: If we hurt other people worse, is it OK if we hurt you, too?
Sorry, but I guess this white Ohioan would rather be woke.
Peter Certo is the communications director of the Institute for Policy Studies.