DETROIT (AP) — Three times in the past four months, William Stein, a technology analyst at Truist Securities, has taken Elon Musk up on his invitation to try the latest versions of Tesla’s vaunted “Full Self-Driving” system.
A Tesla equipped with the technology, the company says, can travel from point to point with little human intervention. Yet each time Stein drove one of the cars, he said, the vehicle made unsafe or illegal maneuvers. His most recent test-drive earlier this month, Stein said, left his 16-year-old son, who accompanied him, “terrified.”
Stein’s experiences, along with a Seattle-area Tesla crash involving Full Self-Driving that killed a motorcyclist in April, have drawn the attention of federal regulators. They have already been investigating Tesla’s automated driving systems for more than two years because of dozens of crashes that raised safety concerns.
The problems have led people who monitor autonomous vehicles to become more skeptical that Tesla’s automated system will ever be able to operate safely on a widespread scale. Stein says he doubts Tesla is even close to deploying a fleet of autonomous robotaxis by next year as Musk has predicted it will.
The latest incidents come at a pivotal time for Tesla. Musk has told investors it’s possible that Full Self-Driving will be able to operate more safely than human drivers by the end of this year, if not next year.
And in less than two months, the company is scheduled to unveil a vehicle built expressly to be a robotaxi. For Tesla to put robotaxis on the road, Musk has said the company will show regulators that the system can drive more safely than humans. Under federal rules, the Teslas would have to meet national standards for vehicle safety.
Musk has released data showing miles driven per crash, but only for Tesla’s less-sophisticated Autopilot system. Safety experts say the data is invalid because it counts only serious crashes with air bag deployment and doesn’t show how often human drivers had to take over to avoid a collision.
Full Self-Driving is being used on public roads by roughly 500,000 Tesla owners — slightly more than one in five Teslas in use today. Most of them paid $8,000 or more for the optional system.
The company has cautioned that cars equipped with the system cannot actually drive themselves and that motorists must be ready at all times to intervene if necessary. Tesla also says it…