Former safety regulators detail Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s frustration with safety rules and how they’ve learned to manage him.
Musk’s own attitude was part of the problem with efforts to enforce safety, the officials said. Somepersonal encounters with Musk that escalated into yelling matches or otherwise proved unproductive because of the CEO’s skepticism about their findings.NHTSA’s experiences with Tesla were unique among major automakers, the officials said.
During much of the Obama administration, Tesla slid under the radar of federal safety regulators. As a niche automaker delivering at most tens of thousands of luxury cars per year, officials said it would not have ranked on the agency’s priority list, compared with high-volume automakers such as Ford and Toyota. From 2013 to 2015, there was just one recall per year for early Tesla Model S luxury sedans.
But Tesla continued to make similar claims, including in 2019, when it said its Model 3 had the “lowest probability of injury of any vehicle ever tested” by NHTSA. The agency ultimately referred the automaker to the FTC. The FTC declined to comment.NHTSA, meanwhile, focused increasing attention on the automaker as it built more and more cars, launching the Model X SUV in 2015 and steadily growing its production in the buildup to the mass market-aimed Model 3.
Under the Trump administration, career officials and top staff were reluctant to take a strong stance on a mounting catalogue of safety concerns, wary of appearing to targetElon Musk’s Starlink is keeping Ukrainians online when traditional Internet fails
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