Billionaire Elon Musk’s roll-out of driverless Teslas has had to hit the brakes after federal regulators raised alarms that the cars had no brakes, according to a new report.
Well, it’s a brake pedal, but still.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched a formal inquiry into the vehicle, preempting Tesla’s Austin launch event Thursday, when the company was to begin charging customers for rides in the driverless car, Politico reported Friday.
Tesla, without seeking any outside sign-off first, told regulators it “self-certified” that roughly 1,000 of the robotaxis met federal motor vehicle safety standards, according to the report.
There was just one problem: the Cybercabs do not have a wide array of normally mandated equipment.
NHTSA’s notice says the vehicles lack “permanently attached, conventional manual controls, such as a brake pedal, gas pedal, steering wheel, and mirrors” — equipment ordinarily required under federal law, Politico reported.
Automakers can request an exemption from NHTSA to sell cars without those controls, but regulators say Tesla skipped that step entirely, “opting instead to self-certify compliance on its own.”
NHTSA said it opened the review after seeing “public information,” though it didn’t specify who or what tipped it off. The agency said it will “examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab,” and will look specifically at “the extent to which Tesla’s certification depended on determinations that certain FMVSS are inapplicable to the Cybercab.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to Politico’s request for comment.
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