Report: Tesla Faces Criminal Probe From DOJ Over Its Self-Driving Car Claims

It appears the richest man on this planet just isn’t with out issues.

Reuters reports that Tesla is at the moment going through a beforehand undisclosed felony probe from the Justice Department over its superior driver help system, Autopilot. The probe, which has been ongoing since final yr and was kicked off not lengthy after a number of lethal crashes involving the function, is searching for to analyze whether or not Tesla misled the general public and buyers concerning the reliability of its autonomous expertise.

Tesla beta launched its “Full Self Driving” system again in 2020 and at the moment has over 100,000 lively enrollees from the broader Tesla proprietor pool, TechCrunch reports. While the function is well-liked, vehicles utilizing the driver-assisted system have suffered a whole lot of crashes over the previous a number of years—together with a quantity that proved fatal.

Despite the usage of the phrases “self-driving,” Tesla’s function doesn’t really make the automotive totally autonomous—it requires a driver to maintain their palms on the wheel, whereas the system helps out with turns, braking, pace changes and lane modifications. This is one thing that the corporate has been specific about, although—as it will appear from the felony probe—perhaps not specific sufficient.

Not a lot is understood concerning the felony investigation or whether or not felony prices will likely be introduced towards people or the corporate. However, Reuters factors out that Tesla has repeatedly performed up the reliability of its expertise—together with in its advertising and marketing supplies and at press occasions. Tesla CEO Elon Musk just lately claimed that quickly the corporate would launch upgraded software program to make the system so adept at navigating that folks would be capable to drive round with out “touching the wheel.”

A report revealed this summer season by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Association confirmed that, of all of the accidents involving self-driving automobiles, in any other case referred to as superior driver help techniques (ADAS), Tesla’s utilizing Autopilot represented practically 70 % of them—with some 270 crashes. Still, on the time, analysts cautioned towards studying an excessive amount of into the info bereft of correct context: “I would advise caution before attempting to draw conclusions based only on the data that we’re releasing. In fact, the data alone may raise more questions than they answer,” said NHTSA administrator Dr Steven Cliff, on the time of the report’s launch.

Tesla is already going through investigations over its driver-assisted vehicles from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the state of California, for related causes.

The firm got rid of its media relations workplace in 2020, so Gizmodo couldn’t attain out to the corporate to ask for remark about the latest investigation.