Tesla boasted of its “Full Self-Driving” feature when it was launched but it was revealed that it is a software suite that doesn’t enable full self-driving. This made it fairly unpopular among federal regulators.
In a Tuesday interview with CNBC, National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy clearly stated her concerns about the software. According to her, the company is not putting enough effort to evade an accident when the car is “self-driving.”
“It’s clear that if you are marketing something as full self-driving and it is not full self-driving and people are misusing the vehicles and the technology that you have a design flaw and you have to prevent that misuse,” Homendy told CNBC.
“It’s not full self-driving,” she said during the interview, “unless you’re saying the driver is actually driving the car. Which in this case, it isn’t full self-driving technology? It’s misleading.”
The full self-driving option can be added in the cost of the vehicle, and one will be charged $10,000 for its Autopilot suite. The software has frequently come under scrutiny, particularly once Tesla started testing a beta version of the software with the help of a small subset of drivers on public roads in October 2020.
The software still needs a lot of work, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stated himself, confessing that an August version of FSD was “actually not great.”
A recent FSD update also had to be rolled back over the weekend due to “regression in some left turns at traffic lights,” according to Musk.
The news also comes after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an official investigation into Teslas crashing into emergency response vehicles while on Autopilot earlier this year.
The data of NHTSA states that the Teslas hit service vehicles 11 times since 2018 alone while on Autopilot. It is not known if the FSD was included in the accidents.
This explains why the “Full Self-Driving” is not that much welcomed by the regulators.