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As if things couldn’t get any worse for Tesla in Europe, traffic safety researchers now say they’ve caught the company cooking numbers they gave to regulators in order to get its “Full Self-Driving” system approved.
The discrepancy was spotted by Reuters, which claims that data Tesla gave to authorities in Sweden and the Netherlands grossly exaggerated the safety record of FSD in the United States.
Reuters reports that in a presentation meant for Swedish regulators, Tesla’s policy manager Ivan Komusanac claimed that Tesla’s FSD can travel over seven times farther between crashes than human drivers in the US. Using that claim as a jumping-off point, the presentation continued by claiming that Tesla’s FSD could have saved 32,000 lives and prevented 1.9 million injuries over an indeterminate period of time, the publication reports.
Independent researchers who saw the underlying data behind that claim say the numbers are wildly misleading, because they assume that every vehicle on the road would be replaced by a Tesla in FSD mode, semi trucks and motorcycles included.
While regulatory officials at the Netherlands’ governmental traffic agency RDW told Reuters they tested Tesla’s FSD mode independently, they didn’t explain what that entails, or what the numbers showed. RDW approved Tesla’s FSD mode for supervised deployment back in April, and the Netherlands agency has since notified European regulators of its plans to seek FSD approval throughout the European Union.)
As spokesperson for the European Transport Safety Council Dudley Curtis told Reuters, if Tesla wants to make outsized safety claims, it needs to “give the data to a university, have it independently verified by a qualified researcher, and then let’s talk.”
Tesla did not respond to Reuters‘ request for comment.
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