San Francisco, California, is home to Tesla, a billionaire tycoon, whose company has stated that its future will be centered on robots, self-driving cars, and robots. Musk’s own fortunes, including the promise of a $1 trillion pay package, will depend on the carmaker hitting those milestones over the next decade.
One of the key elements in the proposed trillion-dollar pay package is Tesla’s ability to offer a fully self-driving service, which Tesla is required to do as one of the conditions for selling up to 10 million self-driving car subscriptions.
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According to experts, the dependability of that service is currently in question because there have been numerous accidents, including one where a person has died, and the self-driving feature has been blamed for it.
According to court documents from Monday, Tesla does not want that spotlight, and the company recently reached a settlement with the family of a 15-year-old boy in San Francisco who passed away in 2019 after a Tesla self-driving car struck the car his father was driving. The family of Jovani Maldonado had alleged that the self-driving car was at fault for the accident.
A Florida jury ordered the company to pay $243 million in damages to the family of a female pedestrian who had died in a collision involving a Tesla self-driving car. The jury had determined that the car was in error, setting precedent in similar circumstances to the Maldonados’ case. The company has appealed the Florida verdict.
Tesla has settled cases in the past, but the Maldonado settlement comes at a time when its fourth masterplan, which was unveiled on September 1, has predicted that Robotaxis and robot sales will drive its growth.
By the end of the year and for half of Americans, Musk said its Robotaxis, which is currently being tested in San Francisco, California, and Austin, Texas, will be accessible in many cities across the country. Tesla Robotaxis have safety drivers in San Francisco, but Musk said they would be gone within months if regulatory approvals come through.
Tesla, which is only on the second of a five-point scale of self-driving, is wrongly described as “fully self-driving,” according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and its cars require full driver attention while at the wheel. Teslas are currently prohibited from being driven in the state, which is Tesla’s largest market in the state, for a month. The court verdict is expected next month.
According to Karl Brauer, an analyst for iseecars.com, “musk needs to show a new business model.” Due to increased competition, protests against Musk’s politics, and his role with the Trump administration, which he has since resigned after a falling out with the president, and the company’s profits and sales have decreased in recent months. But sales are likely to dip further as federal tax credits for electric vehicles end on September 30.
Although the business is betting on robots and robots, Brauer claimed that “these court cases have demonstrated that self-driving is a questionable subject.” The projections differ from the reality of self-driving.
Tesla did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Disengagement in the last second
When George McGee’s phone allegedly fell while he was driving his Tesla S car in Boca Raton, Florida, on April 25, 2019. McGee bent down to pick it up when the car, which had been on autopilot, sped ahead and missed a traffic light, according to court documents reviewed by Al Jazeera.
The SUV, which hit bystanders Nabeil Benavides and Dillon Angulo, spun around the seven-seater SUV after it hit a Chevrolet Tahoe parked in a parking lot with such force. Benavides passed away in a wooded area after being thrown 75 feet (23 meters) away. Angulo suffered injuries.
Benavides and Angulo’s families brought a lawsuit against McGee, who admitted to being negligent but claimed he hoped the assisted driving system would handle the situation rather than cause disengagement. The families also brought a lawsuit against Tesla, which resulted in a historic verdict awarding damages of $243 million.
On its website, Tesla says its self-driving cars are likely to have an accident after close to seven million miles of driving, compared with less than one million for regular cars. According to it, its vehicles have among the lowest accident rates among all vehicles that the US government has examined.
Some experts have noted that there have been instances where the assisted driving system malfunctions in the final few seconds before a collision, giving the driver little chance to regain control of the vehicle, despite it being difficult to determine whether Tesla cars have more accidents than other self-driving cars.
Brett Schreibner, the lawyer who represented the Benavides and Maldonado families among other such cases, said nearly all his cases involve situations of last-second disengagement that did not allow the driver enough time to take charge of the car, causing the accident.
Tesla only relies on cameras, leaving the lidar and radar (light detection and range) and the cameras alone. According to experts, it could help solve safety-related issues if three sensors could detect other cars or people nearby.
“I am not being prescriptive on what all they should use, but can you do it with just one sensor rather than radar, lidar and camera working together”? The George Mason University Autonomy and Robotics Center’s director, Mary Cummings, said.
Cummings has cited some of Tesla’s shortcomings in the past as expert witnesses in the Florida case.
“No lidar means Tesla has no redundancy, but it is a lot cheaper and so more accessible”, said Scott Moura, director at the University of California at Berkeley’s Energy Controls and Applications Lab. Waymo’s self-driving car uses all three sensors, whereas Tesla is less expensive than other self-driving cars.
When Tesla eliminated radar in 2021, according to Michael Barnard, chief strategist with TFIE, a consulting firm for climate and energy, he said it was like removing a “sense” when he did not believe it was necessary. “While you can drive in some situations, it is harder to drive in fog, in snow or in downtowns”.
With the Florida verdict, “the door has been opened for Tesla to be held liable,” according to MIT researcher Shua Sanchez, who allows the car to move without the driver’s involvement. He claimed that the settlement in California strengthens that. Sanchez was involved with the Tesla takedown movement, which saw protests at several Tesla showrooms earlier this year when Musk was still involved in efforts to slash jobs and departments at the US government.
Schreibner, who sought damages of up to $1 billion from the company for the Maldonado case before agreeing to pay an undisclosed sum, said he has other similar cases in the pipeline.
Hearings are likely to be held in the case of Sasha Pelletier, a recent college graduate who was preparing to enlist in the military, in March. He was riding his motorbike on a state highway when a Tesla hit him, causing serious injuries. The Tesla was also operating on autopilot in that situation.
According to Shreibner, these cases “have an impact on everyone’s opinion of Tesla self-driving.” He may seek damages of close to $1bn again, which, if awarded, could hurt the company, whose profits were down 16 percent to $1.2bn in the second quarter of 2025.
Tesla may experience “a few rough quarters” with the end of the tax and regulatory credits, according to Musk. However, the business claimed that this would be the “seminal point in Tesla history” for its focus to be on robots, robotics, and robotics.
Analysts say the plan lacks specifics, including how Tesla would combat safety-related concerns on its Robotaxis.
Musk claimed that the company was working on a new artificial intelligence chip that would be 40 times better than the one it has in a September 9 interview with the As In podcast. Additionally, the company is developing a software upgrade that will make its self-driving cars potentially 10- and even two-fold safer than human-driven cars.
Musk also noted that he was speaking not from Washington, DC, but from Tesla’s Palo Alto campus, where he was spending time on the development of the new chip, among other projects.
He will desire a resolution.
If there isn’t a settlement in the California DMV’s case with Tesla, as some state energy experts anticipate, it won’t likely be until October.
“California has the most sophisticated standards for self-driving”, said Berkeley’s Moura. People will be watching what California does because we are the world’s test labs.
Steve Larson, a former executive director of the State Energy Commission of California, said Musk will want the state’s certification and the ability to drive there, given the questions surrounding its self-driving capabilities.
“If California recalls Tesla, others could also do so. He’ll want to settle, Larson told Al Jazeera.
According to analysts, it will take some time before Robotaxis and self-driving cars really start to take off. Brauer of iseecars.com said the move to fully self-driving on a large scale could take a longer time horizon than Musk and others in the industry foresee.
We see the inflection points for scaling in both [Robotaxis and robots] as being farther away than many people think, according to Karl Bello, a senior analyst for the brokerage firm Baird, in a research report last week.
A shareholder meeting scheduled for November 6 would be dominated by the master plan and Musk’s own salary, Bello added.
Source: Aljazeera
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