The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature in relation to four crashes. The collisions took place in reduced-visibility conditions with either the beta or supervised versions of FSD enabled. In a November 2023 incident in Arizona, a Model Y fatally hit a pedestrian, as TechCrunch notes. An injury was sustained in one of the other three collisions, which occurred between March and May this year and all involved Model 3 EVs. The NHTSA says conditions such as sun glare, fog and airborne dust lowered visibility in these incidents. The agency's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is looking into FSD's ability to "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions."

The US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Inspector General is reportedly investigating Neuralink over potential animal welfare violations related to research testing. According to Reuters, internal documents show that staff members have been raising concerns that the company has been rushing animal testing and causing needless suffering and death. The news organization said the company has killed 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, since 2018. Those numbers don't automatically mean Neuralink is violating the law, and the company has passed all USDA inspections of its facilities. Former and current employees told Reuters, however, that pressure from Neuralink founder Elon Musk to accelerate development has led to faulty experiments and, hence, death rates higher than they need to be.

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has initiated an investigation of Tesla's Autopilot system. The probe follows 11 crashes with parked first responder vehicles since 2018, which resulted in 17 injuries and one death. "Most incidents took place after dark and the crash scenes encountered included scene control measures such as first responder vehicle lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board, and road cones," the NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) wrote in a document detailing the investigation. "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes." That covers around 765,000 Tesla electric vehicles, as Bloomberg notes.

Last Friday, the Northern District Court of California finally posted a long-awaited document, a letter written by the lawyer of an ex-Uber security employee. It was a doozy, a 37-page compendium of alleged criminal and unsavory activity witnessed by that employee, Ric Jacobs, while he worked at the company in 2016 and 2017. The letter came to light last week (after much legal tussling) as part of an ongoing lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car spinoff. Waymo alleges Anthony Levandowski, a former employee, made off with trade secrets when when he left to found his own company, then brought those secrets to Uber when it acquired the startup. It's bad news for Uber in this legal fight, but the damage may not stop there.

The Justice Department is investigating whether Uber illegally used software to track drivers for Lyft, its main ride-hailing competitor, to gain an advantage in attracting and recruiting drivers, according to two people familiar with the probe. The FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in New York's Southern District want to know if use of the software, which created fake customer accounts, broke any federal laws, said the people, who didn't want to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly. An Uber spokeswoman said Friday it is cooperating in the probe and that use of the software has been discontinued. The U.S. attorney's office would not comment on the case. The investigation adds to mounting legal problems for Uber, including allegations of corporate espionage involving autonomous vehicle technology and at least one other federal investigation into use of software to thwart local government efforts to monitor its operations.

Uber's been in the headlines for the worst of reasons this year, and the bad news keeps on coming. Now, it looks like Uber is involved in yet another federal investigation. Authorities from the FBI's New York office are looking into whether Uber's Hell software illegally interfered with the operations of its competitor, Lyft. We've previously covered the computer program, which Uber secretly ran for two years. It used a vulnerability in Lyft's systems to spy on the company's drivers from 2014 to early 2016.