The world of self-driving electric vehicles is outpacing Washington lawmakers and regulators, even with major technological hurdles standing in the way of automakers like Tesla achieving true autonomous status.
There are no federal or state laws on the books prohibiting the use of driver assistance software like that used by Tesla on public streets, as long as a driver is behind the wheel and alert. Instead, regulation over the industry varies widely through a patchwork of state laws and executive orders that offer a broad range of discretion over how the technologies can be used on roadways, drawing blowback from safety critics.
Tesla dominates the industry in deploying driver assistance programs in its vehicles, creating no shortage of online videos showing consumers testing their cars’ autopilot abilities, only to make an illegal maneuver or nearly cause an accident, forcing the driver to quickly take over from the software.
Dan O’Dowd, a California tech entrepreneur and one-time U.S. Senate candidate, has for years been screaming from the rooftops for elected leaders to ban Tesla’s driver assistance technology, which is not fully autonomous but used by many drivers as if it were. He accuses the company and its billionaire owner Elon Musk of using the general public as guinea pigs while jeopardizing public safety.
“Take it off our roads. It’s not [Tesla’s] roads to put their two-ton killer robots on,” Mr. O’Dowd told The Washington Times in a phone interview. “They’re using us as a test bed, and they don’t need to.”
He said Tesla has found a loophole with state regulations like in California that require rigorous testing and safeguards for fully autonomous vehicles, such as human-less robotaxis already in use. While Tesla may market itself as having autonomous capabilities with its Autopilot or Full Self-Driving modes, the company downgrades its products in the eyes of the law as merely an advanced cruise-control feature that requires human intervention so that certain rules do not apply.
As part of a yearslong campaign against Tesla and its self-proclaimed “self-driving” technology, Mr. O’Dowd spent more than half a million dollars to air a 30-second Super Bowl ad in select markets last weekend featuring a Tesla in driver-assistance mode mowing down a child-sized mannequin and almost veering head-on into oncoming traffic.
The ad called on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to ban the use of Tesla’s self-driving functions in the face of “endangering the public with deceptive marketing and woefully inept engineering.”
The clip caught the attention of Mr. Musk on Twitter, which he owns. He responded on the social media platform with a laughing emoji to a Tesla supporter who reposted Mr. O’Dowd’s video with a caption thanking him for “spreading the word that Teslas are the leader for general autonomy.”
“They succeeded in sidestepping the relatively little regulation there is,” Mr. O’Dowd said.
Congress has for years tried to crack down on what is or is not permissible for autonomous vehicles or driver-assistance software, but has failed because of disagreements that transcend party lines over how to regulate the increasingly popular industry.
Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and some of his Democratic colleagues have pushed to regulate the industry and called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Tesla for deceptive marketing.
“I was run over by a car when I was five years old, and it’s something you never forget,” Mr. Markey said in a brief interview. “I just want to make sure that these vehicles are safe — not just for people in the car, but for pedestrians.”
Meanwhile, bipartisan coalitions have formed in an effort to pave the way for more self-driving cars.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has safety jurisdiction over autonomous vehicles, changed its safety standards last year at the request of manufacturers so that autonomous vehicles are no longer required to have steering wheels or pedals in order to engineer them to be truly driverless.
Such a move gave way to Zoox, an Amazon-owned driverless venture, announcing this week it has deployed robotaxis for its employees in California as a test case to shuttle them on a small amount of public road between office buildings.
But with roughly 160,000 Tesla owners in the U.S. and Canada who have the ability to hit the streets using their vehicle’s driver-assistance modes, critics like Mr. O’Dowd say regulators are dropping the ball. He continually submits complaints and warnings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration while prodding for answers about its ongoing probe into crashes involving Teslas using its driver assistance programs.
NHTSA acting head Ann Carlson told reporters last month that the regulatory agency is “investing a lot of resources” and “working really fast” to finish its investigation that began in August 2021, according to Reuters.
A 2022 NHTSA report found that within roughly the previous year, Teslas accounted for nearly 70% of the 392 crashes involving driver assistance technologies.
Tesla states that its vehicles still “require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.” But the company has been the subject of lawsuits and come under fierce public scrutiny over its technology and marketing schemes, including in December when a driver said their car’s driver-assistance software caused an eight-vehicle pileup after it unexpectedly slammed on the brakes on a busy highway.
Drivers of such vehicles may still be able to operate them legally on roadways, but officials warn they can still commit wrongdoing if they’re not careful.
In California, for example, law enforcement officials say dozing off behind the wheel of a Tesla while it’s in driver assistance mode — as viral videos have previously depicted — warrants reckless driving charges under current law, despite the lack of explicitly mentioning such technology.
• Ramsey Touchberry can be reached at rtouchberry@washingtontimes.com.