It’s been a year since the California Department of Automobiles opened an investigation into Tesla’s sales offering of the fully self-driving feature, the $12,000 software package that supposedly enables a Tesla to drive itself through city and neighborhood streets.
It’s been nearly six months since the agency, under pressure from the state Senate Transportation Committee, opened an investigation into safety issues related to fully autonomous driving.
What did those investigations result in?
DMV will not say.
When might the results be public?
DMV will not say.
Why does it take so long?
DMV will not say.
For Transportation Committee Chairwoman Lena Gonzalez (De Long Beach), it’s too late to answer.
“Senator Gonzalez has well informed the DMV of her dissatisfaction with the lack of action on this critical public safety issue,” the legislature’s media spokesperson said in an email Wednesday to The Times.
The email said the senator had asked the DMV to set a timeline, but “the DMV has made clear that there is no timeline and no expected end date for the investigation.”
Gonzalez is considering a legislative hearing on the issue. Her office said there is no hearing planned for now, “but that may change as we continue to monitor the progress of the investigation.”
“The review is ongoing and we will contact you when it is complete,” DMV told The Times.
The Internet is full of videos of the erratic and dangerous behavior of fully autonomous cars. May 12 Tesla Crash in Newport Beach The car that killed all three occupants of the car and injured several construction workers, is being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in part to see if an autopilot or fully self-driving Tesla engaged before or during the accident.
A DMV investigation is looking into whether Tesla is deceptively marketing the robot car feature by using the term Full Self-Driving Capability on its online application form and elsewhere on its website. State regulations Banning car makers from using marketing language to suggest that a car is capable of self-driving when it is not. This investigation began in May 2021.
The DMV investigation into the issues raised by Gonzalez is heading into its sixth month with no end in sight. Gonzalez asked the DMV to “evaluate the FSD pilot trials,” for information on how DMV would handle the situation if it deemed full self-driving to be unsafe, and whether there was a risk to the public.
Last year, The Times sought an interview with DMV President Steve Gordon, a former Silicon Valley CEO, but his media relations team fell back each time. Gordon declined similar requests from other media outlets as well. The Times asked to speak with Governor Gavin Newsom or his designee about why his administration has not discussed the matter. Governor’s staff directed the question to the DMV.
Meanwhile, accidents continue.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently investigating 42 accidents involving automated driving systems controlled by robots. Of those, 35 are from Tesla and seven are from other automakers.
Tesla sells a complete self-driving system with a growing list of features Since 2016. In recent years, it has worked to increase the number of people you allow to use its “beta” version. In the Silicon Valley parlance, beta means a program that works but may contain bugs and is not ready for widespread public release.
On YouTube, Tesla customers testing technology on public roads continue Post videos which are shown to quickly veer into oncoming traffic through double yellow lines, fail to stop for semi-trucks swerving in front of vehicles, head toward metal posts and pedestrians, and much more.
In compliance with DMV regulations, companies such as Waymo, Cruise, Argo, Motional and Zoox have used professionally trained test drivers as a safety backup while testing their self-driving systems. Companies report all malfunctions to the DMV as well as report what is known as “disengagement,” the moments when a robot system fails or encounters a situation that requires human intervention from the driver.
Exempting Tesla from those regulations is a matter of meta-analysis by the DMV. The agency said, through public documentation and previous statements by its media relations division, that fully autonomous driving is a driver assistance system, not a standalone system.
Gordon told Gonzalez in a five-page letter in January that the feature is “beyond the scope of the DMV regulations for autonomous vehicles” because it requires a human operator. He noted that DMV regulations only apply to fully self-driving cars, but said the agency would apply “Re-visit” this situation.
In defending the position to Gonzalez and others, DMV officials cited advisory work conducted on behalf of the agency by California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology at UC Berkeley, or PATH.
But Stephen E. Schladover, a research engineer at PATH, said the group’s work with the DMV was purely technical, and focused on the capability of the automated system.
“We are not legal experts,” he said in a phone interview. “That was just a research support contract to provide technical advice along the way.”
Tesla has made clear that its “design intent” for fully autonomous driving is self-driving, Schladover said, and he believes the company’s use of the term is “very harmful to everyone in the world.” [autonomous vehicle] industry, as it would give the whole industry a black eye”, given the incomplete “experimental” state of its technology.
Schladover said he’d like to see more oversight at the state and national level — and he didn’t pull any punches. “This is the job of the NHTSA at the federal level,” he said. “I’d like to see NHTSA trample them.”
Automated car law expert Bryant Walker Smith at the University of South Carolina has spoken and written extensively about the ambiguous nature of the DMV rules, designed with language that lends itself to exploiting a “linguistic gap.” “Tesla’s use of ‘FSD’ is very misleading,” he wrote In a December article for the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.
His article noted that the Society of Automotive Engineers, whose definitions of vehicle autonomy are used extensively by regulators, states in official documents that it is “wrong” to assume that the system is not autonomous because test vehicles require human drivers.
Smith notes that Elon Musk has often stated publicly that full autonomy for Tesla cars is imminent, so fully autonomous driving is being tested as a fully driverless system, and therefore must be subject to the same DMV regulations as all other companies.
Is the DMV any closer to adopting this position than it was five months ago?
DMV will not say.