Elon Musk doesn’t want Tesla to have to do reporting on car crashes and—What do you know—Trump’s transition agrees

Elon Musk spent more than 250 million USD to help re-elected Donald Trump, and now he has an executive job Department of Government Effectiveness. Separately, Musk’s Tesla has long wanted federal safety regulators to drop reporting requirements on car crashes and — what are we hearing? Trump’s transition agrees!

Reuters report that the president-elect’s transition recommended eliminating the reporting rule, saying the data collection was “excessive.” Of course, what one group of people might call excessive, another group might consider quite important in preventing individuals from being killed by self-driving cars.

According to Reuters:

A Reuters analysis on [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] Crash data shows that Tesla accounted for 40 of the 45 fatal crashes reported to NHTSA through October 15. Among the Tesla crashes that NHTSA investigated under the provision was one fatality in 2023 in Virginia when a driver using the car’s “Autopilot” feature crashed into a tractor-trailer and a wreck in California the same year when an autopilot Tesla crashed into an ambulance fire, killing the driver and injuring four firefighters.

NHTSA said in a statement that those data are important for evaluating the safety of emerging automated driving technologies. Two former NHTSA employees said the crash reporting requirement was pivotal in the agency’s investigations into Tesla’s driver-assist features that led to the 2023 recall. Without it, they said data, NHTSA cannot easily detect crash patterns that highlight safety issues. NHTSA said it has received and analyzed data on more than 2,700 crashes since the agency established the rule in 2021. NHTSA said the data has influenced 10 investigations into six companies , as well as nine safety recalls involving four different companies.

As Reuters notes, eliminating the crash reporting requirement “would be especially beneficial for Tesla, which has reported most of its crashes—more than 1,500—to federal safety regulators according to the program.” Trump, Tesla and Musk’s transition did not respond to requests for comment from the agency.

In an interview with Time magazine published this week, the next president is request whether it is a conflict of interest to give Musk “oversight of the regulators of his companies.” Trump replied: “I don’t think so…. I think Elon has put the country before his company for a long time. I mean, he worked at a lot of companies, but really, and I saw that. He considered this his most important project and he wanted to do it. And, you know, I think…he’s one of the very few people who has the credibility to do that, but he puts the country first, and I’ve seen that, before he puts the company mine.”

The Republican Party seems ready to take the “pro” side of polio