The US West Coast is for the electric car manufacturer Tesla an important sales market. In California, of all places, there could soon be a 30-day sales stop. The trigger is a court’s assessment that the company is owned by a tech billionaire Elon Musk (54) exaggerated the capabilities of their Autopilot assistance system.
The California Department of Transportation postponed implementation of the sales freeze for 60 days so that Tesla could make changes. If that doesn’t happen, the dealer’s license will then be suspended for 30 days, the authority said.
According to calculations by a dealer association, Tesla sold almost 135,500 vehicles in California in the first nine months of this year – a decline of 15 percent. This put the company in third place Toyota and Honda.
The court also proposed suspending Tesla’s manufacturing license in California for 30 days. However, the transport authority put this measure on hold for the time being. In California, the Tesla headquarters is located in Fremont.
The debate about the name and marketing of the autopilot system and especially the “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) expansion stage has been going on for a long time. Because FSD does not turn a Tesla into a self-driving car, even if the name suggests it. Anyone behind the wheel must be ready to take control at any time and bear responsibility. This means that FSD is actually just an assistance system.
Waymo is way ahead when it comes to robotaxis
Despite warnings in the Tesla manual, many drivers relied excessively on the Autopilot software, according to the NTSB’s findings. Tesla has already changed course somewhat and speaks of “FSD supervised” in the current version. Only at the “FSD unsupervised” level, which has not yet been introduced as standard, will the vehicles truly drive autonomously.
The Google-Sister company Waymo has more than 2,500 fully autonomous robotaxis on the streets in several US cities and is considered the clear number one in technology for self-driving cars. Waymo wants to raise billions in a financing round for further expansion, reported the website “The Information” and the financial service Bloomberg. The company should be valued at at least $100 billion (85 billion euros), it said, citing people familiar with it. According to Bloomberg, Waymo wants to raise more than $15 billion, while “The Information” reported possibly more than $10 billion.