The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into Tesla’s Cybercab on Friday morning, just hours after the company put the first of the driverless vehicles on the streets of Austin, Texas.
\n\nTechCrunch reports that Elon Musk’s Cybercab has no steering wheel and no pedals. That runs headlong into federal vehicle safety rules requiring manual controls even in robotaxis. The Department of Transportation has proposed dropping those requirements for vehicles built to drive themselves, but the change hasn’t taken effect yet. Tesla told NHTSA it self-certified the Cybercab as compliant with all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards anyway, which is the normal way automakers bring new vehicles to market.
\n\nNHTSA said it opened the investigation to “examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues.”
\n\nThis also happened to Amazon’s robotaxi company, Zoox. In 2022, Zoox self-certified its own vehicle, a cube-shaped robotaxi that also has no steering wheel or pedals. NHTSA hit back that year with a “special order” demanding information from Zoox, then formally launched an audit query in 2023, the same process now aimed at Tesla. Zoox was still deep in testing at the time, and the…
Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/economy/
