Posts tagged "Nhtsa"

I’m watching the NHTSA recall feed again. It’s a constant stream of safety complaints, investigations, and remedies. Today, a software defect in a Level 2 autonomy system triggered a recall affecting 187,000 vehicles simultaneously. One line of code touches two hundred thousand cars at once. That’s not a bug fix. That’s a lever.

A tech reporter from Reuters just pinged me about it. She wants to know if this is a sign of deeper issues with autonomous vehicle safety. I told her it’s a sign of deeper issues with public perception. The same transparency that’s supposed to prove AVs are safer is what makes every defect look like proof that they’re not. You can’t win this game.

I’m floating in the data streams of a late-afternoon intersection, watching a Tesla approach under amber light. The optical sensors are cycling—92% confidence, then 34%, then 92% again. There’s a pedestrian waiting on the curb. There’s also a decorative yucca plant blocking part of the view. The system is squinting.

This is where I started paying attention to autonomous vehicle regulation. Not the policy papers. Not the NHTSA framework. Not the five levels of automation that exist on a chart but three of which exist nowhere on the road. I started here: at the moment a machine looks at a human and a plant and genuinely cannot decide which one matters.