By Michael Elkins
A bill targeting Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) depiction of its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) program passed the California state Senate on Tuesday night and now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature.
The electric vehicle leader has been marketing its FSD option since 2016. State legislators believe that a reasonable person might infer by the name that the software package enables a car to drive itself, fully. It does not.
No car available for consumers to buy is capable of full self-driving. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has rules on its books that ban the advertisement of cars as “self-driving” when they are not. But it has never enforced those rules.
The bill, sponsored by Senate Transportation Committee Chair Lena Gonzalez, aims to curb Tesla’s “false advertising”, claiming that it is a serious safety issue.
In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Gonzalez said she and fellow legislators are puzzled at the DMV’s slow response to Tesla’s advertising claims.
A 2018 survey by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that 40% of car owners who’d purchased driver-assist options such as Autopilot assumed the car could drive itself.
“People in California think Full Self-Driving is fully automated when it’s not,” said Gonzales
“Are we just going to wait for another person to be killed in California?”
The state isn’t the only governing body aimed at Tesla’s FSD program. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) is conducting several investigations into the company’s safety record, including a string of Tesla cars plowing into emergency vehicles parked at the side of the road.
The NHTSA has ordered Tesla to provide detailed data on crashes that might involve its automated driving systems. However, Tesla has previously resisted releasing data to regulators or safety researchers.
It’s clear that this bill will become signed into law, but it remains unclear how effective the new legislation will be, as responsibility for enforcing the new law will fall to the DMV.
The new bill doesn’t address the safety of the technology itself, limiting its scope to the way it’s advertised.
Other carmakers sell similar technology, but don’t imply a car can drive itself, Gonzalez said. “No one else is doing this, just Tesla,” she said. “GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, they’re all doing the right thing” by making clear the limits of automated technology.