In a Boon for Tesla, Feds Weaken Rules for Reporting on Self-Driving

Automakers and tech developers testing and deploying self-driving and advanced driver assistance features will no longer have to report as much detailed, public crash information to the federal government, according to a new framework released today by the US Department of Transportation. The moves are a boon for makers of self-driving cars and the wider vehicle technology industry, which has complained that federal crash reporting requirements are overly burdensome and redundant. But the new rules will limit the information available to those who watchdog and study autonomous vehicles and driver assistance features--tech developments that are deeply entwined with public safety but which companies often shield from public view because they involve proprietary systems that companies spend billions to develop. The government's new orders limit "one of the only sources of publicly available data that we have on incidents involving Level 2 systems," says Sam Abuelsamid, who writes about the self-driving vehicle industry and is the vice president of marketing at Telemetry, a Michigan research firm, referring to driver assistance features such as Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised), General Motors' Super Cruise, and Ford's Blue Cruise. These incidents, he notes, are only becoming "more common."