from the who-needs-oversight? dept

Fri, Sep 11th 2026 05:23am - Karl Bode

It says nothing good about America how easily Elon Musk convinced the press and public he was a supergenius engineer who could cobble together complicated rocket machinery wearing coveralls in his backyard shed.

Hindsight continues to illustrate how Elon Musk’s real skill sets are opportunism, taking singular credit for the innovations of real engineers, the manipulation of a very broken media, and taking legal, regulatory, environmental, labor, and consumer protection “shortcuts” wherever possible.

Enter the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is investigating Musk’s automated-taxi Cybercab deployments in Austin for violating public safety guidelines.

The Trump NHTSA is updating existing Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) to help companies speed toward automated cars and taxis. But until then our previous (already fairly lax) standards still apply. This being America, companies self-certify whether they’re adhering to the rules in order to get a two-year exemption (Amazon’s Zoox got approval last month).

Tesla, owned by a man who doesn’t believe in coherent governance, is facing a new NHTSA investigation for simply refusing to participate in the process

“Ann Carlson, a former acting NHTSA administrator who is now a professor of environmental law at UCLA, says the investigation is likely “an indication that NHTSA is super frustrated with Tesla.” The agency made clear through the Zoox case that it expects driverless vehicle developers to go through the exemption process. “For Tesla to slap them in the face and ignore that—that is gobsmacking,” she says.”

It’s not really all that gobsmacking for a company run by a man who has been extremely proud about his clumsy role in fatally dismantling U.S. federal government functionality — particularly when it pertains to corporate oversight and public safety. This is always who he was. He has a twelve-year old libertarian boy’s understanding of what government does and why it’s necessary.

Of course, this isn’t the first time NHTSA has promised accountability and then delivered the policy equivalent of a wet farting sound. The agency announced it opened an inquiry last year into Musk robotaxis clearly failing to adhere to traffic laws and making constant navigation mistakes.

The NHTSA is also purportedly investigating all the people killed by “full self driving” (FSD) technology and Tesla’s very intentional misrepresentation of what the tech is capable of. That inquiry also appears to be perpetually stuck in neutral, like most of the legal and regulatory inquiries into the country’s richest fake engineer.

Filed Under: cars, cybercab, full self driving, nhtsa, public safety, robotaxis, vehicles
Companies: tesla