Safety troubles tackle Tesla
Safety concerns swarm Tesla as California’s Division of Occupational Safety opens an investigation
Glenn McDonell | Contributor | USD Vista
According to the most current estimates, there are approximately 200,000 Teslas on the road in the United States. One of these innovative all-electric vehicles belongs to junior Abdullah Sultan, who test drove his current Model S P75 last November.
“The torque is one of my favorite things about driving my Tesla,” Sultan said. “I like that I can adjust the steering wheel to fit my grip perfectly.”
First-year Viola Li started driving her Model S P85D last September and enjoys the driving experience.
“Test-driving a Tesla made me not want to drive any other cars,” Li said. “It’s very smooth and I love having direction on the screen in front of me while I’m driving.”
Above everything else, Li appreciates the fact that the vehicle is all electric.
“While all the features are really great, the best thing about my Tesla is that I don’t have to pay for gas,” Li said.
While some, like Sultan and Li, are satisfied with the driving experience that the innovative all-electric vehicle provides, several concerns regarding the safety of the vehicle’s autopilot feature have emerged.
This past March, a man in the Bay Area who was driving a Model X slammed into a concrete divider on Highway 101 while the autopilot feature was engaged, according to a report from The New York Times. This incident added to the list of similar accidents across the country which have raised concerns regarding Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving system.
As scrutiny regarding the safety of the autopilot feature has increased, Sultan hasn’t become any more concerned.
“Honestly I wouldn’t blame the Tesla itself for these accidents,” Sultan said. “As soon as you engage the autopilot, the heads-up display warns you to keep your hands on the wheel at all times and to be attentive.”
Rick Olson, Ph.D. the associate dean of the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering, teaches industrial and systems engineering and agreed that these concerns are in most cases likely the fault of the drivers and not the vehicle itself.
“Some of these drivers are thinking that having a Tesla means they can read their paper on the way to work,” Olson said. “The system might work fine without a driver’s hands on the wheel for a while until suddenly it doesn’t.”
Nevertheless, federal investigations into several crashes in California and Florida over the past several years have concluded that the Model S lacks safeguards to prevent misuse of the autopilot feature, according to The New York Times.
The company’s troubles with safety extend to concerns surrounding the safety of their workers as well. In late April, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health said it had opened an investigation of working conditions at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif.
These ongoing issues of vehicle safety, combined with the current investigation into worker safety at the company’s factor in Fremont, have made for a decline in investor confidence.
Tesla’s shares dropped eight percent in the week after the crash in March occurred, and their bonds have begun to lose value.
Given these financial difficulties, the company has been depending on the rollout of the highly anticipated Model 3 to bring some much-needed profits and reclaim the confidence which propelled the company from the beginning.
However, according to Fortune Magazine, Tesla has had to delay their production target of 5,000 Model 3 sedans for two consecutive quarters, with a temporary halt to production occurring at the end of last month.
Olson said the company’s woes can be largely attributed to overly ambitious production goals.
“They committed themselves to this quota and they were probably overconfident,” Olson said. “There can be problems when you go from small to large mass production, especially when the engineers don’t have time to work out the kinks before ramping up output.”
Elon Musk, the company’s famed CEO and visionary, said on record to a New York Times reporter that meeting his own quotas has resulted in several months of “manufacturing hell.” Then, on April 13, the tech entrepreneur posted a tweet in which he admitted that “excessive automation was my mistake,” and that “humans are overrated.”
Professor Orly Lobel of USD’s School of Law, who specializes in topics surrounding employment and labor litigation, emphasized the value of human workers and said that Tesla’s ability to recognize this human factor is particularly important.
“The race to automation is happening in every industry, but at least for the time being, many human functions cannot be replaced by machines,” Orly said. “The fact that Tesla, a company at the frontier of automation, recognizes the significance of human labor in its factories is important and telling.”
As Tesla has seen difficulties both on Wall Street and on the factory floor, and Musk has been forced to humble himself and come to grips with these realities, Sultan has remained a fan of both the company and its famed co-founder.
“He (Musk) is an incredible visionary of an amazing company who dreams big and achieves what he sets his aims for,” Sultan said. “What’s not to like?”
Whether Musk and Tesla are able to recover from setback and struggle on all fronts and maintain their position at the avant-garde of the electric vehicle industry remains to be seen.