The Transportation Secretary discusses regulating Tesla’s automated driving tech and Elon Musk making plugs available to other electric vehicles.
(Bloomberg) — US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recalls meeting over Zoom with auto manufacturers about a year and a half ago when Elon Musk said Tesla would be willing to adapt some of its electric-vehicle chargers for other cars to be able to use them.
“I was delighted,” Buttigieg said in an interview Monday with Bloomberg News in Washington. “I thought, ‘It sounds amazing; let’s see if they actually follow through.’ And, to their credit, less than two years later, it’s moving forward.”
The EV charging initiative Buttigieg refers to was notable not only for its content — that Tesla will open at least 7,500 plugs to all EVs by the end of next year — but also because of who announced it. The same White House that Musk accused of being biased against Tesla briefed reporters on how the company’s move was consistent with its effort to create a national network of half a million chargers.
“That’s a big deal, and it’ll make a big difference,” President Joe Biden said in a tweet last month. Musk, who once described Biden as a damp sock puppet, replied within an hour: “Thank you, Tesla is happy to support other EVs via our Supercharger network.”
Buttigieg brought EV charging up in the course of describing the Transportation Department’s nuanced approach to both working with and regulating Tesla. The Harvard and Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar and ex-McKinsey consultant rarely skips a beat discussing complex subjects, but he repeatedly paused his way through answers to questions about Tesla and its enigmatic chief executive officer.
“On one hand they, they have done undeniably extraordinary work and made the country better off with their acceleration of electric vehicle manufacturing, and provided a template that a lot of their competitors are racing to keep up with,” Buttigieg said. “On the other hand, I wouldn’t call something ‘Autopilot’ if the manual explicitly says that you have to have your hands on the wheel and the eyes on the road all the time.”
After bowing out of the Democratic Party presidential primaries in 2020, Buttigieg was nominated to lead a department that oversees the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has taken a more activist approach to regulating automated-driving systems. Tesla has marketed such features in controversial ways, charging as much as $15,000 for what it calls Full Self-Driving, or FSD, which requires fully attentive drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and doesn’t render the company’s cars autonomous.
NHTSA opened investigations into possible defects involving Tesla’s standard automated-driving features marketed as Autopilot in August 2021 and February 2022. The agency escalated its first probe — into how Teslas handle crash scenes with first-responder vehicles — in June of last year. That was a busy month: The regulator also disclosed that it had received 758 complaints about Teslas unexpectedly braking at high speeds — the subject of its other defect investigation — and released its first batch of data on crashes involving driver-assist systems. Tesla reported the vast majority of those crashes.
Last month, Tesla recalled almost 363,000 vehicles after NHTSA raised concerns about cars using FSD Beta traveling in unlawful or unpredictable ways, including exceeding speed limits, traveling straight through intersections in turn-only lanes and not coming to complete stops. Tesla paused rolling out the driver-support feature to more customers until it addresses the issues with a software update.
Musk has kept on predicting Teslas will eventually be capable of self-driving — last week, he told Morgan Stanley’s global head of tech investment banking that a smaller vehicle the company is developing will operate almost entirely in autonomous mode. He told investors in May 2019 that Tesla was a year away from having more than 1 million robotaxis on the road.
Bloomberg reported in October that the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission had been investigating Tesla’s self-driving claims. The company confirmed in January that the Justice Department had asked it to hand over documents about Autopilot and FSD.
Buttigieg said he couldn’t speak to whether NHTSA will wrap up its Tesla Autopilot defect investigations before the end of Biden’s presidential term. He said the Transportation Department is both overseeing carmakers’ compliance with the law and trying to get them to go above and beyond what they’re required to do.
“I really try to make this a matter of calling balls and strikes,” Buttigieg said. “When they do the right thing, we’re going to lift that up, and when they don’t, or when there’s a problem as a regulator, we will be there to make sure that people are taken care of.”
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