Tesla (TSLA) has soared on hopes that the Trump administration will make it easier for Tesla’s still-defunct self-driving technology to receive federal approval.
Self-driving technology is currently being tackled at the state level, with each state setting its own regulations for approving self-driving systems on its roads.
During Tesla’s last post-earnings conference call, CEO Elon Musk, who has financially supported Donald Trump’s re-election and has his “full support,” said that the federal autonomous driving hinted that it may work with the new federal government to get the approval process. I’m going.
Now, Bloomberg reports that President Trump’s transition team is discussing making it a priority.
Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have told advisers they plan to make a federal framework for fully autonomous vehicles one of the Department of Transportation’s priorities, according to people familiar with the matter.
The news boosted Tesla’s stock price by 7%, or $70 billion in value.
This is surprising, as regulatory aspects were not previously thought to be the biggest hurdle in Tesla’s self-driving efforts, but getting the technology to work still appears to be the biggest hurdle. .
Tesla has been wrong about its self-driving schedule countless times, the latest being that it plans to release unsupervised self-driving in California and Texas in the second quarter of 2025.
Tesla’s head of FSD, Ashok Elswamy, said Tesla’s goal is to have more than 600,000 miles before critical disengagement, based on NHTSA data on accidents between miles driven by humans. said.
Tesla doesn’t release any data about its self-driving efforts, so the best data available is crowdsourced. That data currently shows the distance to significant breakaway is about 241 miles.
For Tesla to reach a level of safety compared to humans, it would need to improve miles between withdrawals by a factor of 2,500, which was the goal before receiving regulatory approval.
Electrek’s view
That seems like a much higher hurdle than getting regulatory approval.
In fact, I agree with the Trump administration that it makes more sense to create a federal framework for approving self-driving systems than at the state level.
But I don’t see how that will help Tesla, as there is no clear path for Tesla to achieve a level of safety above humans in the near future with its current approach.
At the current pace, a 2,500x improvement would take 10 years, but the pace of improvement has yet to accelerate significantly.
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