Founder of The Dawn Project Dan O’Dowd highlights the defects in Tesla’s self-driving systems, following NHTSA’s announcement that it has opened a preliminary investigation into Actual Smart Summon.
Dan O’Dowd’s comments were published in The Register, please see here, Quartz, please see here, and Cybernews, please see here.
Dan O’Dowd commented: “It’s unsurprising that NHTSA is investigating Actually Smart Summon, given the litany of safety defects and crashes involving Tesla’s self-driving technology.”
“Actually Smart Summon and Full Self-Driving are defective engineering prototypes, and should not be allowed on the road.”
“Musk believes that he is above the law and proclaims that ‘Physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation’. Tesla has repeatedly shown its contempt for regulators and it is concerning that Tesla failed to report any of the 15 accidents NHTSA identified Actually Smart Summon to be involved in to federal regulators. Tesla claims its software is safe but, just like with its Full Self-Driving software, it has been underreporting the number of crashes that its software has been involved in and then used this incomplete data to paint a false picture of the software’s safety.”
“Tesla initially launched the product as ‘Summon’, after this failed to live up to its name Tesla rereleased it under the new name ‘Smart Summon’. However, Smart Summon also failed miserably so Tesla had to rerelease the product under the new name ‘Actually Smart Summon’. Actually Smart Summon is still causing Teslas to crash. We can therefore expect something like Actually Actually Smart Summon to be Tesla’s next failed attempt to release this defective software.”
“NHTSA should immediately ban Tesla’s Full Self-Driving and Actually Smart Summon software, given the obvious risks the software poses to other road users.”