By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) traded 2% lower in Monday’s premarket on National Transportation Safety Board chief Jennifer Homendy’s comments that the carmaker should first address safety deficiencies in its full self-driving technology before enabling it for city driving.
Chief Executive Elon Musk last week said drivers would soon be able to request an enhanced version of what it calls "Full Self-Driving" capability. The upgrade aims to help vehicles navigate cities mostly on their own without the driver’s involvement, a feature that was so far limited to driving on highways.
“Basic safety issues have to be addressed before they’re then expanding it to other city streets and other areas,” she told The Wall Street Journal. Homendy also expressed concern about how Tesla software is tested on public roadways.
Homendy called Tesla’s use of the term 'Full Self-Driving' “misleading and irresponsible."
The technology doesn’t make the vehicle fully autonomous. Tesla advises drivers to remain alert, with their hands on the wheel.
“It (Tesla) has clearly misled numerous people to misuse and abuse technology,” she told WSJ.
Tesla plans to monitor the driving patterns of the customers who request the enhanced system and only give access after seven days of good behavior, Musk tweeted last week. Access to those who aren’t careful will be revoked, he said.
The country’s auto-safety regulator last month launched a probe last month after a spate of crashes involving Teslas’ Autopilot technology.
The investigation covers an estimated 765,000 Tesla Model Y, Model X, Model S, Model 3 vehicles.
While launching the exercise, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that since January 2018, it has identified 11 crashes in which Tesla models "have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles involved with those scenes." There were cases of 17 injuries and one fatality in those crashes.
Tesla’s Autopilot handles some driving tasks and allows drivers to keep their hands off the wheel for extended periods. Despite claims of launching a fully automated vehicle, the company's current technology only qualifies as "level 2" autonomy, on a rising scale of 1 through 5.