Rachel Maddow said Donald Trump’s move to scrap self-driving car crash data reporting is only a “problem solved” for Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk, as the billionaire’s automobile company made up 40 out of the 45 fatal crashes that were reported by the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA) through Oct. 15, 2024.
“Forty out of the 45 fatal incidents. That sounds bad if you’re Tesla, right?” Maddow said during the Monday airing of her show “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Watch the full segment below:
But Maddow went on to point out how Trump stepping in to seemingly save Musk, who has donated at least $260 million to Trump’s reelection and is notoriously heading the president-elect’s DOGE advisory body, is merely a tactic to spare the top 1%. Trump’s recommendation came as part of his 100-day strategy to get rid of “excessive” data collection.
“If you’re Tesla, better to not have people ever hear numbers like that. Therefore, don’t collect the numbers anymore,” Maddow continued sarcastically, outlining the myriad of injuries and fatal accidents Tesla’s auto-pilot-able cars have caused. “Stop collecting all this excessive data — problem solved. Problem solved for Tesla and for Elon Musk. Problem not solved for the Contra County firefighters who were in that truck. Problem not solved for the eight kids in the giant smash-up in the Thanksgiving Day tunnel crash. Problem not solved for the 10th grader sent to the hospital after stepping off the school bus that the Tesla slammed into, right? Problem not solved for them, but it is solved for the billionaire.”
Maddow’s remarks came after news broke that the president-elect’s team intends to remove a mandate that requires companies to report automated vehicle crash data — an order Musk opposes because he claims his company is being targeted by it, which is also the subject of NHTSA’s investigations, three of which were spawned from crash reporting data collected.
On Thanksgiving Day 2022, Musk announced that Tesla car owners had the option to put their vehicles into a self-driving mode. The new model, Full Self-Driving Beta was made available to “anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen,” Musk wrote in a tweet on Nov. 24, 2022. A few hours later, 16 people, including 18 kids, were involved in a multi-car crash on the Bay Bridge of San Francisco, which was caused by a Tesla’s self-driving feature that suddenly pressed its brakes in the tunnel. As of October 2024, the auto-pilot mode has resulted in 51 reported fatalities, per tesladeaths.com.
In November, Trump assigned Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory committee.
