Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday reiterated that safety is the priority as the company scales the abilities of its full self-driving (FSD) driver assistance technology towards autonomous driving.
What Happened: “Safety first, then the convenience features,” Musk said on X. The CEO was responding to Sam Pullara, CTO at venture capital firm Sutter Hill Ventures.
Pullara listed the different features he would appreciate with FSD going forward in a post on X including moving or pulling over to let people pass if they are traveling faster, identifying and avoiding bad drivers, and allowing for breaking the law at stop signs.
Though a majority of drivers do a few things on the road that are technically illegal, U.S. auto safety regulator National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will not appreciate it if FSD did the same, Musk said in his reply.
“Some of this stuff like the rolling stop is technically illegal, so NHTSA gets upset, but 99% of people do it,” Musk wrote.
Challenges To Scaling FSD: Earlier this week, Musk said that Tesla delayed rolling out the new version of FSD owing to issues with driving smoothness.
The company trained the new version too much on interventions and not enough on normal driving, leading to a loss of driving smoothness, the CEO said. "It’s like a doctor training too much on patients in the emergency room vs training on preventative care," he wrote.
Tesla is laser-focused on vehicle autonomy and is attempting to improve its FSD software to enable vehicles to operate without human intervention. However, it presently requires active driver supervision.
Deploying autonomous vehicles hinges on both technological advancement and regulatory approval.
Tesla's Director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy, said in April during the company’s first-quarter earnings call that regulatory hurdles might be minimal if sufficient data proves the safety advantages of autonomous cars over human-driven vehicles.
Other autonomous car companies have also been clearing the regulatory path for Tesla, Elluswamy said, referring to Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo.
Why It Matters: FSD is an advanced version of Tesla's Autopilot and includes features like auto lane change and auto park. In a vehicle safety data report last month, Tesla alleged that its vehicles using Autopilot are relatively safer than its vehicles which do not use the system, and other non-Tesla vehicles.
However, safety concerns remain. In December, Tesla recalled a record-breaking 2.03 million vehicles equipped with all versions of Autosteer (an Autopilot feature), citing insufficient controls to prevent misuse. The company addressed the issue through a software update.
However, NHTSA commenced a probe into the remedy in April, concerned that the update is insufficient.
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