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.”
Tbh this is really frustrating. As many car crashes I ran in my 15 years in EMS, NHTSA has probably saved more lives in the last twenty years than the Dept of Public Health, especially once you consider how for much of America, there really is no alternative to driving.
Plot twist: NHTSA are the only people that approve new designs, so Tesla can’t sell any more cars.
Well we can dream.
I think this is unironically what they are going for everywhere: delegating regulation to industry, as is the case to some extent in aviation. If they get their way, they won’t need approval from the NHTSA or any other agency, because they will self-approve and likely even shape regulation themselves.
Boeing (just one example) has been pushing for lower or self regulation for a while.
That was part of what led to the 737-MAX issue:
Airlines concerned for safety will be moving away from Boeing if the deregulation continues.
The libertarian BS is going to set America back a century - in many respects.
It’s almost as if the fascist apartheid baby has an agenda behind all of this.
The real reason elon is doing this…
no conflict of interest, none at all
This would be REALLY CORRUPT if Elon was the President! FORTUNATELY that’s NOT the Case! They would NEVER let an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT like HIM to do that!
Great, now they can rear-end motorcycle riders even more often
I won’t buy any American car newer than 2024.
Neither will the rest of the world, if their cars fail the safety requirements in all the other countries.
Do the cars not have to be certified? It seems to me that fewer employees just means longer delays for certifications, not easier certifications
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.
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 $$$
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.
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.
I do not see a conflict of interest. 🙈
Be car reliant nation Remove car safety
Hilarious
They say regulations are written in blood.
Elaine Chao is a conservative government official who is famous for not enforcing safety rules or following up on safety complaints and may have violated ethics laws while Secretary of Transportation under Trump’s first regime. While in that role, she rubber stamped a sketchy driver control system implemented by Tesla that later helped kill her own sister (in addition to drunk driving).
Can the lightning bolt of consequences strike twice?
Back in the day where giving Mitch McConnel’s wife a cushy job was path to fascism.
I don’t like to laugh when people die in horrific ways, but that schadenfreude was tasty.
You couldn’t make this shit up…
Cars aren’t safe anymore by standards and tests, they are now safe by declaration.
And Us American declarations are the best declarations in the whole world.
Therefore all the world is going to trust in Us American cars, finally.
And they are so much safer now than European cars, because Us American declarations are so superior to European safety standards and tests.
It’s been going on a long time, look at how cozy Boeing was with regulators
Boeing want cozy with them, it employed them, and when they spoke up about it, they ended up dead. Whether from a conspiracy, or depression at the state or their careers and conscience, Boeing and the agency capture that allows shitty planes to exist bears the responsibility.
Yeeeeuuup.
This is certainly going to improve the prospects of assembled in US cars getting exported…
Oh well, fuck it all I guess, burn it all down.
I’m sure Elon will try suing the EU to force them to buy his cars next.
That is how the free market works: When people don’t wanna buy what you are selling, threaten to sue them for not volunarily agreeing to purchase your service or product.
It’s not like the US auto industry is a key sector of the economy or anything.
That’s why it was so silly that Obama bailed them out, right? They’re only like 5% of the GDP. 5% is a little baby number.
God this country is power sliding into an another Great Recession. What do these idiots think they’re gonna do when a good chunk of the population loses their homes and comfortable lives because of them? A population with nothing to lose, lots of guns floating around, and no prospects for improvement under the current administration should be a very scary future for any leader.
I’d ask if they remember the French Revolution, but these fuckers seem to want to go back to a time before that.
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.
social losses, private profits
What do these idiots think they’re gonna do when a good chunk of the population loses their homes and comfortable lives because of them?
They buy your houses from you and rent them right back to you. That’s what Nestle has done with the poor farmers and all their land (not just their houses) in Romania.
The world is beyond capitalism. It is a new feudalism now. Yanis Varoufakis was right.
They employ even more police (and more guns for them), so that you don’t get no funny ideas.
But if you get funny ideas anyway, they have surveillance of all phones and internet. You have read your George Orwell, haven’t you?
In consideration of the history of the French Revolution, They are using the history of WW2 to fix that little problem
Millions of unemployed dead people will not be a problem they will worry about
Man, idk. If I buy a foreign car, say a Hyundai Ionique (the new sexy one) how do I know it’s manufactured to other international standards and not specifically American standards?
Presumably before you buy something as expensive as a new car, I’d assume you’d look at reviews.
You’d be able to see the car’s Euro NCAP ratings, which, to be frank, were always much more comprehensive in testing than NHTSA anyway.
This isn’t foolproof.
The same car might be manufactured in multiple factories for multiple markets, to multiple levels of certification.
Your “new car” in one country, could be the previous years European model if the euro regs have changed.
That’s true.
how do I know it’s manufactured to other international standards and not specifically American standards?
Well, you don’t need to know anymore now :)
But if you are in Europe, the standards are still in force. No cars may be sold that do not meet these requirements. The manufacturer must declare the conformity for each model, and in addition they are tested by independent organisations sometimes.
FFS, someone end this already
In case you need another reason not to buy a Tesla.
In a few years most of the world probably won’t even be able to. It took Chinese cars decades to come to the worldwide and especially the EU market because nobody in China was developing and manufacturing cars that would pass western safety regulations.
If the only way for Tesla to stay competitive in the US is by loosening the US regulations, they’ll end up with an ecosystem that can only be sold and used in the US. For example, how the Cybertruck is entirely unroadworthy in the EU.
I’m just waiting for the day EU declares that self-driving systems need to be able to detect a wall, even if there is a picture of an open road on it, and stop. It would mean Tesla wouldn’t be able to pass it due to Musk insisting on only using cameras and removing all other sensors.
Pretty much this. The US will now end up with an automotive ecosystem (including fun things like ambulances, firetrucks, buses, etc) where everything is built as cheaply and dangerously as possibly profitable (see: Pinto et al). Sure, the autos we build here aren’t going to be able to be sold anywhere with a functioning regulatory body, but that’s OK because we managed to save $20 on each car we build by not having to include pesky things like airbags or a steering column that won’t impale you in a crash or a body that won’t telescope into you and crush you.
sheer madness
I would expect nothing less! We elected a mad king on purpose. Thus, I fully expect the finest anti-intellectualism Elon can buy.
