Technology

That last sentence stuck out to me too, a simple summary of all this mess. The other interesting part was at the end of the article, where they talk about the potential for the NHTSA requiring a recall fix for the "autopilot" feature that would be so expensive as to seriously damage the company:

The scenario there is if the government is really serious about Autopilot, and frankly, I don't remember the last time NHTSA investigated the efficacy of a recall remedy... he knows that NHTSA is insisting on a hardware fix for Autopilot and FSD," Niedermeyer said, referencing the auto safety regulator's unusual decision to apply extra scrutiny to Tesla's 2-million-car safety recall, announced last week.

With 2 million affected cars on the road, any fix that requires hardware—adding back radar, perhaps, or infrared gaze-tracking driver monitoring, wouldn't be cheap or quick to complete. "If NHTSA demands a level of remedy to problems that can't simply be done affordably... then it's a negative margin business with no way out. And that's a problem you can't just spend your way out of," Niedermeyer said.