TMTPOST -- Tesla Inc. shares rose 4.3% to $436.23, shattering their record close set on Wednesday. Shares rallied after the transition team of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump was said to hit a regulatory order that was seemed as a positive for the electric vehicle (EV) heavyweight.
Credit：Tesla
The Trump transition team has recommended the incoming administration scrap a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) order requiring automakers to report crashes involving self-driving systems, Reuters cited a document on Friday. In the document, the team, which was assigned a task of producing a 100-day strategy for automotive policy, believed the NHTSA order led to “excessive ” data collection.
Neither the Team Trump nor Tesla responded to the report. If the reported recommendation is accurate, the Trump team is attempting to whack an order that Tesla stands against. And to kill the order is evidently a good news for Tesla. The company has had to report more than 1,500 crashes to NHTSA involving its Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot software, Reuters said.
Tesla shares have popped over the incoming Trump administration’s possible deregulation move since Trump’s victory more than a month ago.
Advisors were told that Trump’s transition team planned to make a federal framework for self-driving vehicles one of the Transportation Department’s priorities, Bloomberg reported last month, citing sources familiar with the matter. The Trump team is reportedly looking to staff the department with leaders who will develop a framework for regulating self-driving vehicles. The report also revealed lawmakers’ effort s to clear a path for autonomous vehicles (AVs). A bipartisan legislative measure that’s at the early-discussion stage would create federal rules around AVs, according to the sources.
The U.S. regulation is a major hurdle for Tesla's expansion of its self-driving vehicles. Automakers must secure permission from the NHTSA before putting cars on the road that lack a steering wheel or other controls required by U.S. auto safety rules. NHTSA has long permitted manufacturers to deploy 2,500 vehicles per year under a granted exemption. That is a fraction for Tesla, which sold nearly half a million cars for the third quarter alone. At a robotaxi event that first saw Tesla's self-driving taxi prototype, dubbed Cybercab in October, Musk said Tesla would first allow Model Y and Model 3 drivers in Texas and California to use their car’s suite of automated driving aids without supervision starting next year.
A federal framework could make automakers like Tesla easier to obtain self-driving licenses. “This would be a huge step forward in easing U.S. rules…and be a significant tailwind for Tesla’s autonomous and AI vision heading into 2025,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a report.
Ives, a Tesla bull, felt upbeat on new framework as "Musk’s significant influence in the Trump White House is already having a major influence." “The golden path for Tesla around Cybercabs and autonomous is now within reach with an emboldened Trump/Musk strategic alliance playing out in real-time and very in line with our [Tesla investment] thesis,” Ives said.
Friday saw another positive development of Tesla’s autonomous driving push. Tesla announced it launched its "Actually Smart Summon" (ASS) feature through over-the-air software updates in China, the most important overseas market for the company. ASS is an improved version of Smart Summon, which was rolled out with Autopilot Software Version 10 in 2019. Tesla first released ASS in its home market U.S. in September, and then rolled out the feature Europe and the Middle East last month.
ASS enables vehicles equipped with Tesla’s FSD and Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) to autonomously navigate to drivers from a parking spot on its own. ASS can direct a vehicle to its driver’s location or a selected spot. Users who use ASS are able to access a live feed from their vehicles’ cabin to help them supervise the Actually Smart Summon maneuver.
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