NHTSA Has Questions About Tesla's Crash Data

At a time when many automakers and tech companies are developing self-driving vehicles, regulatory agencies are doing their best to oversee those developments. Notably, Tesla has taken an ambitious approach to this tech, to the extent that there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to CEO Elon Musk’s predictions about it. That’s the idealized version of modern autonomy; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s various investigation into Tesla for crashes involving its so-called Full Self-Driving and Autopilot software represent something closer to reality.

That trend took an interesting turn this week when NHTSA announced yet another investigation into Tesla, this time taking issue with the timing of some of the incident reports the company filed relating to crashes involving FSD and Autopilot. NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation determined that “the reported crashes occurred several months or more before the dates of the reports,” when Tesla was required to send the reports “within one or five days of Tesla receiving notice of the crash.”

As part of the organization’s standard policy, they are currently “[evaluating] the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them.” According to NHTSA, Tesla has told the Office of Defects Investigation that this inconsistency was the result of “an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been fixed.”

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In an analysis of NHTSA’s announcement at Electrek, Fred Lambert observed that the agency is opting for caution in its approach to Tesla, rather than accepting the automaker’s explanation without doing research of its own.

Given the number of past investigations involving the automaker’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving — and the gulf between Elon Musk’s promises and the reality of the features — it’s not hard to see why NHTSA is taking Tesla’s answers with a grain of salt.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…