Don’t take your hands off the wheel: Tesla’s autosteer actually INCREASES risk of crashes; previous findings were “misinterpreted”

The federal government “misinterpreted” crash data pertaining to the Tesla’s auto steer function and misled the public about the safety of the Tesla Model S. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) exaggerated the safety data for this popular self driving vehicle, claiming that the Tesla “crash rate” drops 40 percent when the auto steer function is installed.

A more intelligent analysis of the data, conducted by the Quality Control Systems Corporation (QCSC), found that the auto steer function is 2.4 times more likely to cause airbag deployment. This is information that the NHTSA had, but it was not relayed until the QCSC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to access the data. It turns out that the government lied about the safety of the auto steer function.

It should be noted that proponents of the “Green New Deal” believe the government should phase out 99 percent of combustion engine vehicles and replace them with electric self driving vehicles such as Tesla’s. Electric and self driving vehicles will be promoted by democrats in the years to come as safety concerns for this mode of transportation are swept under the rug.

Government’s investigation into Tesla autosteer function turns out to be a manipulation of the data

In 2016, a Tesla was involved in a fatal crash in Florida. The Tesla Model S was cruising on Autopilot before the crash. The Tesla struck a tractor trailer and caused the death of the passenger, who trusted the vehicle’s autonomous function. The NHTSA had no choice but to investigate the incident. Instead of trying to solve the safety issues with the vehicle’s autonomous function, the NHTSA promoted the Tesla  and exaggerated its safety in its final conclusion. These documents, now debunked, can be found on NHTSA’s website.

The QCSC investigation debunks the NHTSA’s conclusions, that the auto steer function reduces crashes by 40 percent. This statement is not only unsubstantiated, but also failed to relay the actual risks with the auto steer function. The QCSC said the government’s conclusion were “not well-founded.” Strangely enough, the NHTSA did not respond to QCSC when they wanted to discuss the actual data. The QCSC investigation was not funded by Tesla’s rivals and had no industry support to deal with the litigation that was necessary in order to obtain the skewed data. QCSC’s 24 page report, “NHTSA’s Implausible Safety Claim for Tesla’s Auto steer Driver Assistance System” rebukes the government report. The QCSC report states, “The actual methodology applied by NHTSA to Tesla’s data was not adequately explained by the Agency when its claim about auto steer was announced.”

The QCSC found out that the data was skewed and manipulated to promote the autosteer software. The actual mileage when the auto steer software was installed was only reported for less than half of the vehicles that the NHTSA studied from 2016 to 2017. “For those vehicles that do have apparent exact measurements of exposure mileage both before and after the software’s installation, the change in crash rates associated with auto steer is opposite of that claimed by NHTSA – if these data are to be believed,” QCSC wrote. The NHTSA blatantly ignored exposure mileage for vehicles that had high mileage before the auto steer function was installed. The government did Tesla a favor by cherry-picking data sets for mileage information.

The QCSC analysis carefully accounted every one of the 43,781 vehicles in the data set, and detailed how the NHTSA manipulated the vehicles into different groups to boost the efficacy of their crash rate after the auto steer function was installed. The QCSC also detailed how the NHTSA dismissed select data sets that would hinder their preconceived conclusions.

Sources include:

Dailymail.co.uk

Jalopnik.com

NHTSA.gov

TheFederalist.com