Elon Musk voiced considerations on Twitter over the current appointment of Missy Cummings to a key advisory position on the nation’s high site visitors authority, however U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg urged the Tesla CEO communicate to him immediately about any considerations as a substitute.
“He is welcome to name me if he is involved,” Buttigieg advised reporters at an occasion on Wednesday, in accordance with Reuters. “We’re chargeable for ensuring that each automobile on the street is protected.”
Musk has taken umbrage with the appointment of Duke College engineering and pc science professor Missy Cummings as a security adviser on the Nationwide Visitors Freeway Security Administration (NHTSA). “Objectively, her monitor report is extraordinarily biased in opposition to Tesla,” he mentioned Tuesday.
Objectively, her monitor report is extraordinarily biased in opposition to Tesla
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
October 20, 2021
Cummings, who directs the People and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke, responded that she was “completely happy to sit down down and discuss” to Musk anytime.
Cummings has additionally been a frequent Twitter consumer, usually airing her considerations over Tesla’s driver help expertise and the corporate’s strategies for rolling it out on the social media platform. In September, she despatched a series of tweets criticizing Tesla’s rollout of the “security rating” as a approach of permitting drivers entry to its “Full Self-Driving” beta program.
However her criticisms of Tesla return a lot additional. Two years in the past, Cummings said (also on Twitter) that Autopilot, Tesla’s superior driver help system, “simply causes mode confusion, is unreliable and unsafe.” She added that NHTSA ought to require the automaker to show it off.
Cummings’ nomination to the protection advisory position at NHTSA may counsel a extra conservative stance on superior driver help programs (ADAS) and Tesla on the company sooner or later.
In fact, NHTSA and Tesla aren’t any strangers. In August, the company opened a safety probe into Autopilot, after discovering 12 incidents through which Tesla autos crashed into parked emergency autos. Regulators additionally investigated an incident involving a deadly crash in 2017 and 25 additional crashes involving Tesla’s ADAS since that point.
As late as August, in response to a tweet asking Cummings whether or not she thinks FSD may ever obtain full autonomy, she mentioned: “my prediction is never.” However that doesn’t imply she essentially thinks LiDAR — gentle detection and ranging software program that measures distance with pulses of laser gentle — is the reply both. As a substitute, she urged that full self-driving is not going to be attainable with out “a complete rethink of reasoning under uncertainty” that may solely be led to by means of advances in deep learning.
Tesla supporters, below the banner “Autopilot Customers for Progress,” have began a Change.org petition urging President Joe Biden and NHTSA employees to overview the appointment for considerations relating to battle of curiosity and bias.
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