Elon Musk has pledged the work of his so -called department of government efficiency, or Dogewould be “highest transparent.” Doge's Website is proof of this, the Tesla and Spacex The CEO, and now the White House counselor, has repeatedly said. There, the group keeps a list of slashed grants and budgets, a running tally work.
But in recent weeks, New York Times reported That Doge has not only posted major mistakes on the website -Creeding Doge, for example, with saving $ 8 billion when Cancellation of the contract is for $ 8 million And it paid $ 2.5 million – but also worked to obfuscate those mistakes after the fact, deleted the recognition of details about DOGE's cuts from the website, and eventually even from its code, which made it easy for the public to prove and monitor.
For road safety researchers following Musk for many years, the modus operandi is feeling familiar. Doge “put some numbers, they don't smell good, they move things,” said Noah goodallan independent transport researcher. “That shouted Tesla. You get the feeling that they're not really interested in the truth.”
For nearly a decade, Goodall and others have been tracking public releases of Tesla to its autopilot and full self -driving features, advanced driver helping systems designed to make driver more stressful and safer. Over the years, researchers claimed, Tesla released safety statistics without proper context; Those that are promoted numbers that are impossible for outside of experts to prove; Touted to -Wiser Safety statistics that eventually proved to be misleading; And even though the safety statistics have changed retroactively. Numbers are inconsistent that Tesla fans full driving were taken to crowdsourcing The performance data itself.
Instead of public data releases, “What we have is the little snippet that, when researchers look at them in context, seems to be suspicious,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor and engineer studying autonomic vehicles at the University of South Carolina.
The government helped whoopsie
The first and most public number of tesla arrived in 2018When it released the first autopilot safety figures after the First known death of a driver using autopilot. Immediately, the researchers noted that while the numbers seemed to show that drivers using autopilot were more likely to crash than other Americans on the road, Figures have no critical context.
At this time, Autopilot combined the adaptive cruise control, maintaining a set distance between Tesla and the vehicle in front of it, and the help of steering, keeping the car centered between the line marks. But the comparison didn't control for the type of car (luxury vehicles, the only kind tesla made at the time, are less likely to crash than others), the person driving the car (Tesla owners were more likely to be affluent and older, and thus less likely to crash), or the types of roads where Teslass were were (Autopilot operated only on divided highways, but crashes are more likely to occur on rural roads, and especially connector and locals).
The confusion did not stop there. In response to the deadly autopilot crash, Tesla made Provide some safety numbers to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the country's road safety regulator. With those figures, the NHTSA Have been published a report indicating that autopilot has led to a 40 percent reduction in crashes. Tesla promoted the desired statistics, Although it is mentioned whenIn 2018, another person died while using autopilot.
