According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk’s Office of Government Efficiency has fired almost half of the small government teams regulating self-driving cars.
Citing anonymous sources, the shooting is part of a wider 10% cut at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as a result of probation workers shooting and shooting of a takeover offer.
The firing preceded Tesla’s planned Robotaki launch in Austin later this year.
NHTSA has investigated Tesla several times in an accident that occurred while working with Autopilot, Tesla’s advanced driver assistance software. Some of the agent’s probes to Tesla are still open. In October, the NHTSA began a new investigation into Tesla’s so-called “Fully Autonomous Driving (Counter)” software after four crashes in low visibility conditions. One of them led to the death of pedestrians.
Tesla’s FSD is said to be an advanced driver assistance system that can drive autonomously in urban and highway environments. The goal of the mask is to improve camera-based software to full autonomy by this summer.
Aside from dealing with crash test dummies and firing people who helped the state get safety subsidies funding, Doge has a total of about seven employees in a new office dedicated to overseeing self-driving cars. Three of them have been eliminated, the Post reports.
The post cited its source saying it believes these cuts will affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety cases behind Tesla’s vehicles.
Other companies are also affected by NHTSA’s approach to regulation, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox. The companies face their own investigation into safety incidents related to autonomous driving software.
TechCrunch contacted NHTSA and Doge to learn more.
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