Tesla (TSLA) is soaring in anticipation that Trump’s administration will make an easier path for Tesla’s self-driving tech, which still doesn’t work, to be approved federally.
Currently, self-driving technology is addressed at the state level, with each state having its own regulations for approving self-driving systems on its roads.
During a conference call following Tesla’s last earnings results, CEO Elon Musk, who has been financially backing the reelection of Donald Trump and “fully endorsed” him, hinted that he could work with the new federal government to get a federal self-driving approval process going.
Now, Bloomberg reports that Trump’s transition team is discussing making it a priority:
Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have told advisers they plan to make a federal framework for fully self-driving vehicles one of the Transportation Department’s priorities, according to people familiar with the matter.
This news sent Tesla’s stock up 7%, or an increase of $70 billion in value.
That’s surprising because before now, the regulatory aspect of Tesla’s self-driving effort didn’t seem like the biggest hurdle – making the technology work still seems to be the biggest hurdle.
Tesla has been wrong about its self-driving timeline too many times to count, but the latest one is to release unsupervised self-driving in California and Texas in Q2 2025.
Ashok Elluswamy, the head of FSD at Tesla, stated that Tesla’s goal is to achieve over 600,000 miles between critical disengagement, which is based on NHTSA’s data of accidents between human-driven miles.
Tesla has not released any data about its self-driving effort, and therefore, the best data available is crowdsourced. That data currently shows about 241 miles between critical disengagement:
Tesla would need a 2,500x improvement in miles between disengagement to reach a safer-than-human level, which has been the goal before getting regulatory approval.
Electrek’s Take
That sounds like a much bigger hurdle than getting regulatory approval.
I actually agree with the Trump administration that it makes more sense to have a federal framework for approving self-driving systems than at the state level.
But I don’t see how it will help Tesla since there’s no clear path to Tesla achieving a level safer than human with their current approach any time soon.
At the current pace, the 2,500x improvement would take 10 years and we have yet to see a significant acceleration to the pace of improvement.