Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast.
This is a show about Elon Musk, his companies such as Tesla,
SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink, and also we talk
about DOGE sometimes. Today we're going to be talking
about Tesla and also the Donald Trump administration and how the
new administration could set the tone for the future of EVs in a
weird way. And I think it might be a little
bit dangerous. And I want to know what you
think in the comments down below.
But let's take a look at this article from Reuters.
First and foremost, we have to know when information is out
there. Team Trump wants to scrap the
car crash reporting rule that Tesla opposes.
OK, so Elon Musk and Donald Trump are friends.
They're buddies. Elon Musk bought his way into
the White House basically. And I know it's a controversial
take, but he did donate a bunch of money to Trump.
And also he's one of the leads on the doge new department for
the Trump administration. So of course, you know, you have
to, you have to call it like it is.
The guy knows what's going on. He knows how to get his way.
And Donald Trump is one of those guys that if you pay him enough
money and he likes your ideas, you're going to get your way.
So let's talk about this for a second.
Trump transition team recommends repealing requirement that
companies report automated vehicle crash data.
So let's just take that by itself.
Repeal the requirement that companies report automated
vehicle crash data. Elon Musk and Tesla are making
automated vehicles. What happens at a fin automated
vehicle crashes. They want to report that crash
to somebody. Of course, the authorities,
police, ambulance, possibly you get those people involved, but
also the little black boxes, if you will, everything that's
recorded up until that point. Does that belong to the user of
the vehicle? Does that belong to Tesla or
should that be sent in to the government to check out?
That's what they're talking about.
The required data could be sent to the government.
Your data and your car. How would you drive and what
happened during this crash? Maybe not.
I mean, you're not driving because it's automated, but it's
an Elon Musk car, it's a Tesla. So is this because they don't
want to get caught? Think about that for a second.
I want you to think about that and I want you to comment down
below too, because this is a community.
We're building, building this community.
And I want to have an open discussion about this.
I'm coming at it from 1 Slant and I want you to come at it
from your ideas too. So Elon Musk's Tesla opposes the
requirement, arguing it has unfairly targeted his company.
Unclear if Donald Trump administration will adopt the
recommendation to quash reporting requirement.
OK, so we don't know yet. Trump isn't quite in office yet.
So we don't know if he's going to make an executive order or if
he's going to kind of nudge some people the right way.
That's it's politics, man. It's that's what they do.
They nudge people the right way. Hey, we're going to do you a
favor. You're going to do us a favor
later. Let's get this thing done.
Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop
a car crashing reporting requirement opposed by Tesla,
according to a document seen by Reuters.
A move or was this a move that could cripple the government's
ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles
with automated driving systems? Do they want to regulate the
safety of these vehicles or do they just want to to let them do
whatever they do when they crash and have no data?
I mean, that's that's what it comes down to.
Elon doesn't want anybody to have the data of what happened
during these autonomous crashes. Is it a privacy thing?
Maybe. Is it an accountability thing?
More than likely. Now.
Musk, the world's richest man, spent more than 1/4 of a billion
dollars helping Trump get elected president in November.
Removing the crash disclosure provision would particularly
benefit Tesla, which has reported most of the crashes
more than 1500 to federal safety regulators under the program.
This has been targeted in National Hwy.
Traffic Safety Administration investigations, including three
stemming from the data. Out of 1500 crashes, three came
from this data. 3 probes came from this data and targeted by
National Hwy. Traffic Safety Administration in
investigations, but only three came from the data, so that's
not a big deal. Recommendation to kill or to
kill? The crash reporting rule came
from a transition team tasked with producing A-100 day
strategy for automotive policy. The group called the measure a
mandate for excessive data collection, The document seen by
Reuters shows. The Trump team, Musk and Tesla
did not respond to requests. Of course they're not going to
like that. Who would?
Reuters could not determine what role, if any, Musk may have
played in crafting the transition team recommendations
or the likelihood the administration would enact them.
We don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
Elon and Tesla there and then you know, it goes on to say that
there is. NHTSA crash data shows Tesla
accounted for 40 out of the 45 fatal crashes reported to NHTSA
through October 15th. 40 of the 45.
One of the Tesla crashes NHTSA investigated under the provision
for a 2023 fatal accident in Virginia where a driver used the
car's autopilot feature is slammed into a tractor trailer,
and a California wreck the same year where an autopilot Tesla
hit a fire truck, killing a driver and injuring 4
firefighters. I would want to know if I were
those people's family, what happened.
That's not being selfish, that's just being rational.
You know, you want to know what happened?
How did your loved one die? And if the NHTSA can get that
data and let you know that it was because of Tesla's faulty,
something you want to know about that so you can take the action
that needs to be taken against somebody who did you wrong?
I can understand that. I can understand Tesla saying
that it's a huge privacy risk because you might have an hour's
worth of data before then. What if you're in a place that
you don't want anybody to know about and you shouldn't tell
anybody where you're going or where you're where you're coming
from. That's your data.
That's your personal information that you don't want spread
anywhere. You don't want anybody else
looking at it. And that would be a weird thing,
I think, for people to have that data.
NHTSA said a statement that such data is crucial to evaluating
safety of emerging automated driving technologies.
They said the crash reporting requirements were pivotal to
agency investigations into Tesla's driver assistance
features that led to 2023 recalls.
And without the data, NHTSA cannot easily detect crash
patterns that highlight safety problems.
So not only it is the NHTSA using this crash data to, you
know, to hold people accountable, it's not just Tesla
either. It's other automated driving
vehicles out there, so not just Tesla, they're not just
targeting Tesla. So we can't get all up in arms
about that. And HTSA said it has received an
analyzed data on more than 2700 crashes since the agency
established the rule in 2020. One 2700 crashes in 3:00-ish
years, that's not that many. Data influence 10 investigations
into six companies, not just Tesla, NHTSA said, as well as
nine safety recalls involving 4 different companies.
So they're not targeting Tesla directly and only Tesla.
One example, NHTSA find Cruise, the self driving start up owned
by GM 1.5 million in September for failing to report a 2023
incident in which a vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian.
Could've been struck by another car.
Like you need that data. You need to know what happened.
GM said this week it would end robotaxi development of Cruise
and folded into its group of working driver assist other
technologies. I don't know I I would like to
have a discussion about This October Tesla earnings call must
call for a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles
rather than a patchwork of state laws, he called incredibly
painful to navigate. That's true.
Every state has their own laws about autonomous driving.
The federal government should step in and give a framework to
all these states about how this works.
I think my own personal opinion, because if you have to go
through every single state and do different rules for every
state, you have to develop software for every different
state, that's incredibly difficult.
I mean, it, it depends of course, what the requirements
are, but you'd probably have to develop some other software for
these other States. And that's, this is a lot of
it's a lot of work. And that can postpone the
development of these vehicles, this autonomous driving future
for a decade. You know, you never know how
fast these things can change as well.
Like a state could change the law and then you have to rebuild
a bunch of code like this. I'm a, I'm a developer.
I run a development house, a web designed firm.
I know how hard it is. I know what it's like when, when
things change and when you have to take your 10,000 lines of
code, sift through it, figure out which code, which part of
the code, and even if it's well documented to figure out which
part of the code does what. I mean, it's, it's incredibly
difficult to get some of these things to work properly after
you actually find out where the code is and you redo it takes a
long time. OK.
So Trump has, of course, promised to push for regulatory
changes, slim down the government.
That's what the doge is all about, the Department of
Government efficiency that Elon's part of, along with
Vivek. You know, they're outside the
government. They're telling Trump what to
do, not, he's not going to always do action on all these
things, but there's they're telling him, hey, man, we need
federal regulations for autonomous driving.
We don't want our black boxes checked out.
We don't want our data checked out.
So can you please help us there? More data and more crashes.
Tesla is among the most prominent automakers developing
advanced driver assistant features and which can assist
with lane changes, driving speed and steering.
If you ever been at a Tesla, it's quite insane to be in there
while it drives itself. Hands off the wheel.
The thing just goes and knows where you're going and we'll
take you there and we'll park you now.
Incredible. And now with the robo taxis
coming up, it's going to be wild, impossible.
Less than $30,000 Tesla vehicle that might have some sort of it.
It should have an auto driving feature of some sort, a full
self driving system, autopilot, something don't know yet, but
we've heard the rumbles about the new Tesla and it looks
sounds pretty awesome under $30,000.
You know, there's Department of Justice criminal probe here
examining whether Tesla exaggerated his vehicle self
driving capabilities, misleading investors and harming consumers.
So they have a point here too. And this is sort of it's off
topic. I don't know why Reuters did
this, but the Department of Justice has nothing to do with
this. So it's a weird thing for them
to do that, but the NHTSA is who's taking care of this.
So the full self driving, definitely a thing that Elon is
pumped up for a really long time and hasn't come to full
fruition. It's partially there.
It's not full self driving. It does drive itself most the
time, but not fully. It's getting there though.
It can go from point A to point B and park you at the new place,
which is really, really cool and great, but it's not full self
driving yet. Auto summon is cool.
That's a really cool feature of summon your car to you.
You get in, then when you get in you can tell to go wherever you
need it to go and then I'll park you there.
So it's almost there, but you do have to do assisting sometimes,
so that's another part of it. I didn't mean to do that.
I didn't mean to click that link.
Here we go. So Tesla despises the crash
notification requirement, believing the NHTSA presents the
data in ways that misleads consumers about the automaker
safety, two sources familiar with Tesla executives thinking
told Reuters. Here's another part of it that I
liked. NHTSA cautions that the data
should not be used to compare one automaker safety to another
because different companies collect information on crashes
in different ways. And if they had, like I was
saying before, a framework for all this stuff, the NHTSA, if
they know exact like they have a certain data point set that they
have to reach and if every automaker has that data point
set, everybody can be treated equally and fairly when it comes
to these reports. Here's another.
Brian Walker Smith, University of South Carolina law professor
who focuses on autonomous driving, said Tesla collects
real time crash data that other companies don't and likely
reports a far greater proportion of their incidents than other
automakers. It's true, 100% true.
They report everything, everything they can.
Other automakers possibly don't have as many data points because
one, Tesla's been doing this for a really long time.
They've been in the EV game forever.
Other automakers are just catching up Hyundai.
But like, there's no way they could write the same code that
the the test the crew can do because they just haven't been
doing it for long. Like they haven't been able to
maintain a code base that long or upgrade a code base that
long, or optimize a code base that long and implement new
features and new bugs, of course, which could cause
crashes. And the NHTSA just wants that
data so they can show people what happened.
I think that's, I mean, the other thing is like, do you do
most people trust the government with their data?
Probably not. But you know what?
It's not driving data. But everything I have on this
phone, I'm pretty sure the government has access to it.
Yours too. They can track wherever you are.
You ever notice that like wherever, whenever there's like
something that happens in the news, it's like they
triangulated the person's whereabouts with their phone
because the provider provided that data to the government.
So they're watching, you know, they can't watch you.
And if they're watching your phone, this thing has a, you
know, it's a pretty powerful computer in it, pretty easy to
handle. What about your giant car mega
computer in that thing handling all the data?
These are this is just triangulating a signal from like
tower A, tower B to tower C. Then when you're in the middle,
they know where where you move around, they know where you are.
So having all that data in your car while you're driving from
point A to point B to Point C, then somewhere between B&C, you
get in a wreck. The government gets sent that
data automatically before, maybe before Tesla even sees it or any
other auto manufacturer sees it before you see it, of course,
because you're just a bystander at that point because you're
just, you're in the thing. It's an autonomous vehicle.
So by that time, they already have the data through already
crunching the data. It's going through all their
steps. And then do they send it to
Tesla first? Do they send to the automaker
first? Do they send it to you first?
No, they keep it for themselves. Then they make a judgement about
who did what wrong and is that right?
I want to know. Let let me know in the comments
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this and I want to have a discussion with you about this.
So this is another thing that I want to show you.
One last thing, Tesla also has also likely has a greater
frequency of crashes involving driver assistance technologies
because he has more vehicles on the road equipped with them and
drivers engaged systems more often.
That means the vehicles may may more often get into situations
that they aren't capable of handling.
So Tesla has more vehicles, so of course they have more
crashes. That's makes sense.
It's a lot of averages. It's very simple.
I don't know, I, I'm in, I'm in between this one.
This one's tough because I would, if something were to
happen to something that I love, somebody that I love, I want to
know what happened. But I also don't want people
tracking my car all the time. Like NHTSA shouldn't be tracking
your vehicle all the time or tracking you when you have a
crash, you know, is that a, is that a thing that you agree
with? And that is that a freedom
situation? Like is that a freedom argument
that you can make? Like this is this is your
freedom they're taking away. Let me know.
All right, that's about it. Everybody take care of
yourselves and each other. Remember to leave a comment,
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Like I said before, see you in the next one.