. . . all that smart, that is.
Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:
"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise! You're not in the car. ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own. It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."
What's not to like? Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is. And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you. How cool is that?
And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times. Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)." No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date.
So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.
Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles. The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways. This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means. If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible. But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open? I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible. It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents. And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.
The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology. There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short.
How much regulation is too much? It depends on who you ask: the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.
Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths. The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price.
On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there. In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today.
There are two extremes to think about. The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year. Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business? I doubt it. There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.
Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations. This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable. Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them. Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.
On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions. Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones.
It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features. Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it. But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).
My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either. The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on.
And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells. I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out. Not everybody else will, though.
Sources: An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d. I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI.
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