Tesla’s current market cap is mainly credited to its autonomous driving tech promises. Elon Musk himself said that they would turn Tesla cars into “appreciating assets” instead of goods that devaluate, as most vehicles are. Although Tesla has repeatedly failed to deliver on these promises, its shareholders hope it will get there. When they heard Missy Cummings would become a senior adviser for safety at NHTSA, they panicked.
If you have never heard about Cummings, you probably do not follow the autonomous driving tech discussion very closely. She is more than just a Duke University engineering and computer science professor. Mary Louise Cummings is one of the first women ever to become a fighter pilot, something she did for eleven years of her life.
The autonomous driving tech researcher is also the director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and Duke Robotics. There, she has been studying “human-unmanned vehicle interaction, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-systems engineering, public policy implications of unmanned vehicles, and the ethical and social impact of technology,” as her bio page at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineerings website says.
Cummings has long criticized the approach Tesla adopts about testing beta software on public roads. She has been very vocal about the short comings of Autopilot and FSD for a long time. This is what terrifies Tesla bulls and investors. Apart from the tweet storm Cummings' nomination has caused, they have started a petititon at Change.org to revert her nomination.
Photo: Tesla
The news about Cummings’ appointment as a senior adviser for safety was not the main topic of what Reuters wrote about NHTSA. It also said that the agency is finally getting an administrator after not having one approved by the Senate since January 2017, when Donald Trump was inaugurated as the U.S. 45th president.
Joe Biden chose Steven Cliff to formally head NHTSA. The former deputy executive officer at the CARB (California Air Resources Board) has been NHTSA’s acting head since February 2021. What changes is that his name will be submitted to the Senate to officially make him the administrator.
Under Cliff’s command, NHTSA has already opened an investigation on why Tesla vehicles on Autopilot crash into emergency vehicles. After Tesla released an OTA (over-the-air) update to allegedly fix that, NHTSA sent Tesla a letter asking why it did not treat this software update as a recall.
Photo: Tesla
That already shows Tesla will be under more scrutiny under Biden’s administration, but Cummings’ nomination scared the company’s investors the most. Tesla has long presented its vehicles as safer than others based on statistics that have been repeatedly questioned by independent researchers such as the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and Duke Robotics.
Tesla has also been free to deploy beta software testing on public roads simply by stating that Autopilot and FSD are Level 2 systems, which exempts them from needing test permits. The problem is that Autopilot and FSD aim to offer autonomous driving, which makes them Level 4 attempts, as Philip Koopman and William H. Widen urged the U.S. Department of Transportation to admit.
The autonomous driving tech researcher and the professor at the University of Miami School of Law wrote a text for “Jurist” that states FSD Beta is a Level 4 program because of its “actual design intent.” That means it has to be tested in tracks and only be on public roads with trained drivers that follow a strict set of rules. In other words, it would have to follow the rules everyone planning to develop autonomous cars have to obey.
Photo: Tesla
Tesla advocates believe that this will “prevent progress” and stop Tesla from getting data from real-world usage to perfect its system. The truth is that the company has been doing so since October 2015, when Autopilot was first deployed as part of Tesla software version 7.0. So far, it did not help it achieve its goals.
Since then, the company has released a new computer that would make cars autonomous called HW 3.0. Elon Musk announced it on April 22, 2019, at Tesla Autonomy Day, and said all Tesla vehicles produced from that day on would have it. But that was not what happened.
Customers receiving new cars with HW 2.5 started asking Tesla to deliver what Musk had promised. In China, Tesla was forced by the government to replace the HW 2.5 from vehicles in which it was installed after the company said they would get the newest hardware.
Photo: Tesla
All those concerns were flushed down the toilet when Tesla revealed it is developing yet another computer. Disclosed at the Tesla AI Day, the Project Dojo introduced a new chip, called D1, that will finally make Tesla vehicles autonomous. In other words, forget about HW 3.0 – and about radars, something the company also said it would not need anymore.
Those episodes show that Tesla bulls are concerned for no reason. If Tesla’s promises about autonomous driving were feasible, the company would have already delivered on them. It would not have developed new hardware, removed radars, changed its strategy, and made new promises about its technology.
All the data it already collected would be more than enough to develop a software that would confirm “autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem,” as Musk said during an interview in 2016. At Tesla Autonomy Day, he said that all the company needed was the right software.
Photo: Tesla
What Missy Cummings’ nomination brings to NHTSA is the technical expertise the agency was said to lack for many years. The researcher knows quite a bit about autonomous tech to dispute bold allegations about safety that end up making cars more dangerous in traffic. Ironically, that’s what Tesla fans are now accusing her of being: against traffic safety. In fact, the list is long: they say she is a TSLAQ (short seller), funded by Big Oil, etc.
Elon Musk reinforced the hostile reception by fans by saying that, “objectively, her track record is extremely biased against Tesla.” Cummings said she is happy to sit down and discuss the situation with the Tesla CEO anytime. Journalists have also tried that approach with him to no avail. With Cummings, he should: she is now in a position to do more than just warn about the dangers of "autonowashing" and overreliance in beta software.
The senior safety advisor at NHTSA will be most known for attacking tech that saves lives
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