The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Tesla's powerful automation system. They market it as full self-driving and in following concerns it is defective after a series of crashes, one which resulted in a fatality. Craig Trudel Relentless on this, Craig. This is to do with the weather, right? Yeah, this is at least sort of the grounds for the investigation that is sort of narrowly looking at the issue of, you know, when Teslas are being operated on FSD and in an environment where visibility isn't great. So think of like foggy conditions. But I would point out that it's not necessarily the case that these investigations would sort of stay in that narrow scope where we've seen a precedent just with autopilot, this sort of standard driver assistance system that you get when you buy a Tesla that we saw in its open in an investigation after multiple crashes involving police cars or fire trucks.

And that investigation led to a much broader recall where Tesla sort of, you know, came around to this idea that, you know, what next. You're right. We will sort of, you know, find that there's a defect with our system, that people aren't paying enough attention while they use it. And we'll do a remedy to try and address that. Craig, as you note, because you're one of the editors of my reporting about Tesla, I'm an FSD user, and actually I've posted on X quite a lot about using it in foggy conditions and some of the bizarre happenings when using the technology. One question that I have and many have is about this probe and how it's different from prior probes and why actually this time around it may have teeth, so to speak, whereas in the past we haven't seen much happen after the probe. Yeah, I think it's interesting.

These defect investigations tend to take quite a bit of time. I mentioned the autopilot one. It took, you know, I think several years really for anything to really come of that. And, you know, so that is one thing to note that it tends to move at a speed that is not sort of befitting of our, you know, modern sort of daily drumbeat of headlines. Age. I do think that what's interesting here is that, you know, just with that autopilot investigation that precipitated a recall, Tesla was able to address that with an over-the-air software update, or at least they tried to do so. And it's gone back and said, you know what, we're not sure that that went far enough. So I think when you ask about, you know, whether or not this could have teeth, I think the real question here, if you're a Tesla investor, is, you know, will

Nitze get to the point where they say, you know what, Tesla, we think that you don't have sufficient hardware for people to be able to use these systems safely. And do you need to do more for, you know, monitoring drivers better and install equipment to do that? Do you need to put in sensors to handle these poor visibility conditions that would cost Tesla some real money? And does that question the pace, which is slower than rivals of a cyber cab or a fully independently driving car that we already see on the streets of Waymo? Yeah, I think it's key here that, you know, it's a I think this is going to have to, you know, have some say in Tesla following through on what Musk said last week about being able to offer a version of FSD that doesn't have to be supervised, at least in certain states. You know, Musk mentioned that in Texas and California.

You know, it just strikes me as hard to sort of take him at his word that that timeline can possibly be achieved when we're seeing evidence, you know, year after year of crashes involving people using these systems and, you know, them not necessarily, you know, being safe enough to regulators' liking.

Tesla Faces FSD Probe

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