Behind Tesla FSD facing security allegations

On February 25, Tesla's "semi-finished" FSD (full auto drive system, the acronym of Full Self Driving) entered China, and the first batch of car owners' measured videos were swished on the social platform, "taking over twice in less than ten minutes, bus lane identification failure, frequent lane changes of compaction lines, red and green light misjudgment led to red light running..." These problems have deeply questioned the safety of Tesla's FSD. Prior to this, Tesla FSD had already faced safety allegations in the United States, Germany, and other places. Behind this series of events, there are many factors worth exploring in depth.

From a technical perspective, Tesla FSD adopts a pure visual solution, relying on 8 cameras to obtain environmental information and using neural networks for image recognition and decision-making. Although this technological route theoretically has the advantages of low cost and high data processing efficiency, it has exposed many problems in practical applications. At night or under severe weather conditions, such as rainstorm and fog, the sensitivity of visual perception will decline significantly, leading to deviation in the recognition of the surrounding environment. Earlier cases showed that in rainstorm, the Tesla FSD system would repeatedly correct the path at an interval of 0.03 seconds. This high-frequency adjustment was far beyond the limit of human response, which was very easy to cause accidents. Moreover, its built-in neural network has 48 data input layers and processes 1000 frames of environmental data per second. This "end-to-end" learning mode makes the decision-making process untraceable, and once an accident occurs, it is difficult to determine whether the cause of the accident is an algorithm error or other factors.

From the perspective of market promotion and user perception, Tesla is suspected of exaggerating its features when promoting FSD. Musk has been promoting Tesla's autonomous driving capability for many years, and since publicly announcing in 2015 that he would "achieve autonomous driving within two years," he has made 10 promises and missed 9 tickets. However, some of Tesla's promotional content on social media implies that car owners can still rely on FSD to reach their destination in situations where they are sick, tired, or unsuitable for driving. This contradicts the company's official statement that requires drivers to always maintain attention and misleads users' judgment of FSD's true capabilities. Many users, after purchasing Tesla vehicles and activating the FSD function, mistakenly believe that the vehicle can drive completely autonomously, thereby relaxing their vigilance towards driving, which undoubtedly increases the risk of accidents. For example, when using the FSD function, a car owner suddenly accelerated and lost control, almost causing a fatal accident. The car owner complained that Tesla did not respond, which not only disappointed and angered the car owner, but also raised widespread public concerns about the safety of FSD.

From a regulatory perspective, there are still many gaps and imperfections in the global regulation of autonomous driving technology. In the United States, although the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched an investigation into Tesla FSD, the investigation process and punishment measures are relatively lagging behind. There were already multiple accident reports before the investigation into Tesla's FSD function was launched in October 2024, but regulatory agencies only began to take action. In Europe, a German court ruled that the Autopilot system installed in Tesla Model 3 had "defects" and was deemed "unsuitable for normal use" due to "ghost braking" issues. However, this is only the action of individual countries, and there is a lack of unified and comprehensive regulatory standards throughout Europe. In China, regulations related to autonomous driving are constantly being improved, and Tesla FSD faces challenges in localized regulation after entering China, such as cross-border restrictions on data. Due to inadequate regulation, Tesla lacks sufficient constraints and standards in the development and promotion of FSD technology, which has also led to frequent safety issues to a certain extent.

The safety allegations against Tesla FSD are the result of multiple factors, including technical defects, misleading market promotion, inadequate regulation, and industry competition. For Tesla, it is necessary to pay more attention to technology research and development, safety testing, regulate market promotion behavior, and actively respond to regulatory requirements; For regulatory agencies, it is necessary to accelerate the improvement of regulations and standards related to autonomous driving, and strengthen the supervision of enterprises; For consumers, they should view autonomous driving technology rationally, not overly rely on it, and always maintain a sense of safe driving. Only in this way can we promote the healthy and safe development of autonomous driving technology.