It turns out it’s actually possible for a corporation to drag its feet for so long that even the Trump administration takes issue with it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it will investigate Tesla’s habit of taking months to submit accident reports that involve the company’s driver-assistance technology, according to a report from Reuters.
Just how late is Tesla getting its crash report information to the NHTSA? The agency asks that companies submit reports within one to five days of receiving notice that a crash occurred. Tesla has been taking “several months or more,” according to a notice published by the agency. That has probably produced a lot of “Hey, just circling back” emails as the NHTSA tries to get Elon Musk’s company to comply.
As a result, the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation has opened an audit into the issue as part of an effort to “evaluate the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them.” According to Bloomberg, the agency has blamed the delays on “an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been fixed,” but it sounds like they’re going to look into it just to be sure. Not that Tesla would ever lie about such things or try to hide or obscure safety information by doing things like, for instance, ask a judge not to disclose data collected from crash reports.
The fact that Tesla has managed to draw this scrutiny to itself is something of a minor miracle, given how friendly the current administration has been when it comes to autonomous vehicles. Earlier this year, the NHTSA announced that it would even roll back some of its rules regarding self-driving vehicles and the safety protocols that govern them, including specifically easing the reporting rules for crashes that involve autonomous technology. And yet, Tesla finds itself here, getting scrutinized for failing to follow the loosened regulations that its CEO lobbied for.
You can throw this case in the pile of ongoing NHTSA actions related to Tesla. Back under the Biden administration, the agency opened up an investigation into Tesla’s full self-driving technology after it was involved in four reported collisions, including one fatal crash. Another Biden-era action opened a probe into reports of Tesla vehicles being involved in crashes while a feature that allows drivers to move the car remotely was engaged. Back in June, NHTSA also started asking Tesla about its robotaxi service that it launched in Texas, with the aim of learning if Tesla employees can remotely control the vehicles.
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