Government Stealing Tesla User Data?
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk podcast. This is a show about Elon Musk, his companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink, and also we talk about Doge sometimes. Today we're going to be talking about Tesla and also the Donald Trump administration and how the new administration could set the tone for the future of EVs in a weird way.

And I think it might be a little bit dangerous. And I want to know what you think in the comments down below. But let's take a look at this article from Reuters. First and foremost, we have to know what information is out there. Team Trump wants to scrap the car crash reporting rule that Tesla opposes. OK, so Elon Musk and Donald Trump are friends. They're buddies. Elon Musk bought his way into the White House, basically.

And I know that's a controversial take, but he did donate a bunch of money to Trump. And also he's one of the leads on the Doge new department for the Trump administration. So, of course, you know, you have to you have to call it like it is. The guy knows what's going on. He knows how to get his way. And Donald Trump is one of those guys that if you pay him enough money and he likes your ideas, you're going to get your way.

So let's talk about this for a second. Trump transition team recommends repealing requirement that companies report automated vehicle crash data. So let's just take that by itself. Repeal the requirement that companies report automated vehicle crash data. Elon Musk and Tesla are making automated vehicles. What happens at a Finn automated vehicle crashes? They want to report that crash to somebody of course,

The authorities, police, ambulance, possibly you get those people involved, but also the little black boxes, if you will, everything that's recorded up until that point, does that belong to the user of the vehicle? Does that belong to Tesla or should that be sent in to the government to check out? That's what they're talking about. Required information.

Data could be sent to the government, your data in your car, how you drive and what happened during this crash. Maybe not. I mean, you're not driving because it's automated, but it's an Elon Musk car. It's a Tesla. So is this because they don't want to get caught? Think about that for a second. I want you to think about that. And I want you to comment down below too, because this is a community we're building.

Building this community, and I want to have an open discussion about this. I'm coming at it from one slant, and I want you to come at it from your ideas, too. So Elon Musk's Tesla opposes the requirement, arguing it has unfairly targeted his company. Unclear if Donald Trump administration will adopt the recommendation to quash reporting requirement. OK, so we don't know yet. Trump isn't quite in office yet.

So we don't know if he's going to make an executive order or if he's going to kind of nudge some people the right way. That's it's politics, man. It's politics. That's what they do. They nudge people the right way. Hey, we're going to do you a favor. You're going to do us a favor later. Let's get this thing done. Trump's transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car crashing reporting requirement opposed by Tesla, according to a document seen by Reuters.

A move, or was this a move that could cripple the government's ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated driving systems? Do they want to regulate the safety of these vehicles? Or do they just want to let them do whatever they do when they crash and have no data? I mean, that's what it comes down to. Elon doesn't want anybody to have the data of what happened during these autonomous crashes.

Is it a privacy thing? Maybe. Is it an accountability thing? More than likely. Now, Musk, the world's richest man, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get elected president in November. Removing the crash disclosure provision would particularly benefit Tesla, which has reported most of the crashes, more than 1,500, to federal safety regulators under the program. Tesla's been targeted in National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigations, including three stemming from the data. Out of 1,500 crashes...

Three came from this data. Three probes came from this data. Targeted by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in investigations, but only three came from the data. So it's not a big deal. Recommendation to kill the crash reporting rule came from a transition team tasked with producing a 100-day strategy for automotive policy. The group called the measure a mandate for excessive data collection.

The document seen by Reuters shows the Trump team, Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests. Of course, they're not going to like that. Who would Reuters could not determine what role, if any, Musk may have played in crafting the transition team recommendations or the likelihood the administration would enact them.

We don't know what's going on behind the scenes with Elon and Tesla there. And then, you know, it goes on to say that there is NHTSA crash data shows Tesla accounted for 40 out of the 45 fatal crashes reported to NHTSA through October 15th. 40 of the 45 mother Tesla crashes NHTSA investigated under the provision where a 2023 fatal accident in Virginia where a driver used the car's autopilot.

Feature is slammed into a tractor trailer and a California wreck the same year where an autopilot Tesla hit a fire truck, killing a driver and injuring four firefighters. I would want to know if I were those people's family, what happened? That's not being selfish. That's just being rational. You want to know what happened? How did your loved one die?

And if the NHTSA can get that data and let you know that it was because of Tesla's faulty something, you want to know about that. So you can take the action that needs to be taken against somebody who did you wrong. I can understand that. I can understand Tesla saying that it's a huge privacy risk because you might have an hour's worth of data before then.

What if you're in a place that you don't want anybody to know about and you shouldn't tell anybody where you're going or where you're coming from? That's your data. That's your personal information that you don't want spread anywhere. You don't want anybody else looking at it. And that would be a weird thing, I think, for people to have that data. NHTSA said a statement that such data is crucial to evaluating safety of emerging automotive driving technologies.

They said the crash reporting requirements were pivotal to agency investigations to test the driver assistance features that led to 2023 recalls. And without the data, NHTSA cannot easily detect crash patterns that highlight safety problems.

So not only is the NHTSA using this crash data to, you know, to hold people accountable, it's not just Tesla either. It's other automated driving vehicles out there. So not just Tesla, they're not just targeting Tesla. So we can't get all up in arms about that. NHTSA said it has received an NLIGHT data on more than 2,700 crashes since the agency established the rule in 2021. 2,700 crashes, wow.

In three years, that's not that many data influenced 10 investigations into six companies, not just Tesla. And he said, as well as nine safety recalls involving four different companies. So they're not targeting Tesla directly and only Tesla.

One example, NHTSA find cruise, the self-driving startup owned by GM 1.5 million in September for failing to report a 2023 incident in which a vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian who'd been struck by another car. Like you need that data. You need to know what happened. GM said this week, it would end robo taxi development of cruise and fold it into its group of working driver assist other technologies. I don't know. I would like to have a discussion about this, but,

October Tesla earnings call must called for a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles rather than a patchwork of state laws. He called incredibly painful to navigate. That's true. Every state has their own laws about autonomous driving. The federal government should step in and give a framework to all these states about how this works. I think my own personal opinion, because if you have to go through every single state,

and do different rules for every state, you have to develop software for every different state. That's incredibly difficult. It depends, of course, what the requirements are, but you'd probably have to develop some other software for these other states. And that's just a lot of work. And that can postpone the development of these vehicles, this autonomous driving future, for a decade.

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Contact your local retailer to book a test drive or design your own vehicle at volvocars.com slash US. The Volvo XC90 Recharge Plug-in Hybrid. The electric car with a backup plan. You never know how fast these things can change as well. Like a state could change the law and then you have to rebuild a bunch of code like that. I'm a developer. I run a development house, a web design firm called

I know how hard it is. I know what it's like when things change. And when you have to take your 10,000 lines of code, sift through it, figure out which code, which part of the code, and even if it's well-documented, you have to figure out which part of the code does what. I mean, it's incredibly difficult to get some of these things to work properly after you actually find out where the code is and you redo it. It takes a long time.

Okay, so Trump has, of course, promised to push for regulatory changes, slim down the government. That's what the DOJ is all about. The Department of Government Efficiency that Elon's part of, along with Vivek. You know, they're outside the government. They're telling Trump what to do. He's not going to always do action on all these things, but...

They're telling him, hey, man, we need federal regulations for autonomous driving. We don't want our black boxes checked out. We don't want our data checked out. So can you please help us there? More data and more crashes. Tesla is among the most prominent automakers developing advanced driver assistant features, which can assist with lane changes, driving speed, and steering. If you've ever been in a Tesla, it's quite insane to be in there while it drives itself.

Hands off the wheel. The thing just goes and it knows where you're going and we'll take you there and we'll park you now. Incredible. And now with the robo taxis coming up, it's going to be wild, impossible, less than $30,000 Tesla vehicle that might have some sort of, it should have an auto driving feature of some sort, a full self-driving system, autopilot, something don't know yet, but we've heard the rumbles about the new Tesla and it looks, sounds pretty awesome under $30,000.

You know, there's Department of Justice criminal probe here examining whether Tesla exaggerates vehicle self-driving capabilities, misleading investors and harming consumers. So they have a point here, too. And this is sort of it's off topic. I don't know why Reuters did this, but the Department of Justice has nothing to do with this. So it's a weird thing for them to do that. But the NHTSA is who's taking care of this.

So the full self-driving definitely a thing that Elon has pumped up for a really long time and hasn't come to full fruition. It's partially there. It's not full self-driving. It does drive itself most of the time, but not fully. It's getting there though. It can go from point A to point B and park you at the new place, which is really cool and great, but it's not full self-driving yet.

Auto summons cool. That's a really cool feature. Summon your car to you. You get in. Then when you get in, you can tell it to go wherever you need it to go. And then I'll park you there. So it's almost there, but you do have to do assisting sometimes. So yeah,

that's another part of it i didn't mean to do that i mean to click that link here we go so uh tesla despises the crash notification requirement believing the nhtsa presents the data in ways that misleads consumers about the automaker safety two sources familiar with tesla executives thinking uh told reuters

Um, here's another part of it that I liked and I see say cautions that the data should not be used to compare one automaker safety to another because different companies collect information on crashes in different ways. And if they had like I've seen before a framework for all this stuff, the NHTSA, if they know exactly, like they have a certain data point set that they have to reach. And if every automaker has that data point set, everybody can be treated equally and fairly when it comes to these reports.

Here's another Brian Walker Smith, the university of South Carolina law professor who focuses on autonomous driving said Tesla collects real-time crash data that other companies don't and likely reports a far greater proportion of their incidents than other automakers. That's true. A hundred percent true. They report everything, everything they can. Other automakers possibly don't have as many data points because one test has been doing this for a really long time. They've been in the,

EV game forever. Other automakers are just catching up Hyundai, but there's no way they could write the same code that the Tesla crew can do because they just haven't been doing it for long. Like they haven't been able to maintain a code base that long or upgrade a code base that long or optimize a code base that long and implement new features and new bugs, of course, which could cause crashes. And the NHTSA just wants that data so they can

show people what happened. I think that's, I mean, the other thing is like, do you, do most people trust the government with their data? Probably not, but you know what? It's not driving data, but everything I have on this phone, I'm pretty sure the government has access to it. Yours too. They can track wherever you are. You ever noticed that like wherever, whenever there's like something that happens in the news, it's like they triangulated the person's whereabouts with their phone. Yeah.

Because the provider provided that data to the government. So they're watching, you know, they can watch you. And if they're watching your phone, this thing has a, you know, it's a pretty powerful computer in it. Pretty easy to handle. What about your giant car?

It's a mega computer in that thing, handling all the data. This is just triangulating a signal from like tower A, tower B to tower C. And when you're in the middle, they know where you move around. They know where you are. So having all that data in your car while you're driving from point A to point B to point C, then somewhere between B and C, you get in a wreck. The government gets sent that data automatically.

Maybe before Tesla even sees it. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. One of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year, he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now, you don't even need to wrap it.

Or any other auto manufacturer sees it before you see it, of course, because you're just a bystander at that point because you're just you're in the thing. It's an autonomous vehicle. So.

By that time, they already have the data. They're already crunching the data. It's going through all their steps. And then do they send it to Tesla first? Do they send it to the automaker first? Do they send it to you first? No, they keep it for themselves. Then they make a judgment about who did what wrong. And is that right?

I want to know, let me know in the comments down below, whatever podcast platform you're on right now, wherever you're listening. If you're on YouTube, please give this video a thumbs up, give it a like, because I want to know if you enjoy content like this and also hit the subscribe button because it helps out the show tremendously. Also on any podcast platform, hit the sub button or the follow button, because I want to know this and I want to have a discussion with you about this.

So this is another thing that I want to show you. One last thing. Tesla also has also likely has a greater frequency of crashes involving driver assistance technologies because it has more vehicles on the road equipped with them and drivers engaged systems more often. It means the vehicles may, may more often get into situations that they aren't capable of handling. So Tesla has more vehicles. So of course they have more crashes. That makes sense. It's a lot of averages. It's very simple.

I don't know. I, I'm in, I'm in between this one. This one's tough because I would, if something were to happen to something that I love, somebody that I love, I want to know what happened, but I also don't want people tracking my car all the time. Like NHTSA shouldn't be tracking your vehicle all the time or tracking you when you have a crash, you know, is that a, is that a thing that you agree with?

And is that a freedom situation? Like, is that a freedom argument that you can make? Like, this is your freedom they're taking away. Let me know. All right. That's about it, everybody. Take care of yourselves and each other. Remember to leave a comment, like, subscribe on any podcast platform you're on right now. Spotify, leave a comment. YouTube, leave a comment. Leave a review, a five-star review on any podcast platform you're on right now if you like this topic.

Take care of yourselves and each other. Like I said before, see you in the next one.