“A massive pile of backlog” awaits the Biden administration,” said Paul Eisenstein, publisher of the Detroit Bureau industry news site. It launched several safety investigations into Tesla and other companies but left most unfinished. The agency went the full Trump term without a Senate-confirmed administrator, leaving deputies in charge. “No direction,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor and expert in autonomous vehicle law at the University of South Carolina. “Dormant,” said Jason Levine, executive director at the Center for Auto Safety. ”Inactive,” is how Carla Bailo, president of the Center for Automotive Research, summed up NHTSA’s four previous years. That NHTSA has so far declined to confront Tesla directly on the issue is firmly in character for an agency that took a hands-off approach to a wide range of matters under the Trump administration. But its messaging competes with marketing of Tesla itself, which recently said it will begin selling a software package for Full Self Driving - a term it has used since 2016 despite objections from critics and the caveats in the company’s own fine print - on a subscription basis starting this quarter. Officially, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration discourages such behavior, running a public awareness campaign last fall with the hashtag #YourCarNeedsYou. Videos of Tesla owners gleefully abusing the Autopilot system, a set of driver-assist technologies including adaptive cruise control, have become something of a genre across social media over the last few years, even as drivers have been killed while trusting it to operate their vehicles for them. If you haven’t, perhaps you’ve seen another like it.
Maybe you’ve seen this viral TikTok video: A young man lies in the back seat of his Tesla, covered in blankets, as the car cruises down the highway.
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