Musk fuming at feds
Tesla blames crash victim as family weighs suit
Tesla is on a rocky road with federal regulators — but it’s shifting into high gear anyway.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s electric-car maker blasted the National Transportation Safety Board onThursday, accusing the agency of being “more concerned with press headlines than actually promoting safety.”
That was after the NTSB said it had removed Tesla as a cooperating participant in its probe of the fiery March 23 crash of a Model X outside San Francisco, in which driver Walter Huang died after hitting a concrete median while in Autopilot mode.
The NTSB said it clamped down because Tesla had violated an agreement not to disclose details of the crash while it was investigating. Tesla revealed March 30 that Huang had received several warnings from the Autopilot software to put his hands back on the wheel in the seconds leading upto the crash.
Tesla, however, claimed on Thursday it made the deci- sion to leave the investigation to better fend off “claims which made it seem as though Autopilot creates safety problems whenthe opposite is true.”
Tesla said it sympathized with Huang’s family, but nevertheless blamed Huang again on Wednesday, saying the driver was “well aware that Autopilot was not perfect.” What’s more, Tesla said Huang had previously com- plained that Autopilot appeared faulty onthe stretch of highway in Mountain View, Calif., where he died.
That was after Huang’s family said it had hired law firm Minami Tamaki to explore legal options, adding the firm believed the Autopilot feature probably caused his death. The firm said its preliminary review of the crash suggested Autopilot was defective.
The NT SB complained that releasing incomplete information often leads “to speculation and incorrect assumptions about the probable cause of a crash, which does a disservice to the investigative process and the traveling public.”
Tesla countered that it chose to go public with the information because it couldn’t wait on the NTSB’s “12 to 24 month process” while speculation about the crash intensified.