Last month, Reuters reported that some of Tesla’s safety testing numbers could be exaggerated.
The reporting drove two U.S. senators to ask for the NHTSA to review Tesla’s claims.
The automaker is also pursuing approval to deploy Full Self-Driving in Europe.
Last month, news publisher Reuters reported that Tesla’s leadership had consistently inflated safety testing numbers, saying that the automaker’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system, sometimes known as FSD, is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. Citing that report, two Democratic senators have asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to examine Tesla’s statistics.
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Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote to NHTSA, stating that Tesla’s analysis is “weak and misleading,” and noting that it creates “an urgent safety problem.” The senators set a July 7 deadline for NHTSA to respond.
Some of the questions ask NHTSA whether the agency has formally evaluated Tesla’s claims or reviewed the crash data on which those claims are based. The senators also asked that NHTSA strengthen its evaluation and reporting criteria for all automakers that offer semi-autonomous driving features like FSD. The agency stated that it currently cannot determine if “public safety claims bear any relationship to reality.”
Reuters’ previous report found that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others on the leadership team cited misleading data. Sources interviewed for the story told the publication that Tesla recorded inflated safety numbers for FSD, saying that the automaker compared FSD-related crashes with airbag deployments to national statistics for far less serious crashes. Additionally, the report found that Tesla compares its new vehicles to the average vehicle on U.S. roadways, which are significantly older.
Neither Tesla nor NHTSA responded to Reuters’ inquiries on the topic. The automaker recently presented the same numbers to regulators in Europe, winning approval to deploy FSD in the Netherlands in April. RDW, the country’s road safety officials, said that it relies on its own “tests, analyses, and verifications” of safety features, but it did not say whether it had validated the data Tesla provided.