NHTSA’s important regulatory oversight work stalled for four years with no director at the helm. Now, the Biden administration has a backlog of neglected tasks to dig through.
The lack of oversight on autonomous driving is perhaps the biggest oversight with Level 2 autonomy being the biggest safety challenge. The NHTSA has been pretty much hands-off when it comes to driver-assistance systems, specifically when it comes to Tesla’s misleadingly named Autopilot.
The inaction of NHTSA drew ire from another federal safety agency, the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB – which is most known for its investigations of plane and train incidents – blamed predictable abuse for a 2018 crash where a Tesla Model X crashed into a concrete divider.
Read the article at Jalopnik.