Justice Dept. examining if Tesla committed wire, securities fraud in self-driving claims: Reuters

We have some news that is just crossing the Justice Department investigating whether Tesla committed securities or wire fraud by misleading investors and consumers over its vehicles self driving capabilities. It’s according to a new Reuters report just out citing 3 people familiar with the probe. Tesla’s autopilot and self driving systems assist with things like steering and lane changes but are not fully autonomous. And we’re watching shares of Tesla falling on the back of that report about 3 1/2%. Phillipo is with us right here on set. Wanted to get your thoughts on this report, Not surprising. I look at this report and and we’ve known that the DOJ was looking into autopilot and full self driving. And I think it makes all the sense in the world that Washington would come back and say you have made comments, Elon Musk or Tesla that essentially give the impression that it’s 100% hands free. Now the fine print, and we’ve said this and everybody has said this, they are nowhere close to 100% autonomous vehicle technology and they will say that in their fine print. But apparently, I think what the DOJ is looking at is saying, sure, it’s in the fine print, but did you sell it? Did you tell customers you basically will have a autonomous strategy? I think there’s two questions. How much of this is about what the company and Musk has told investors about the prospect of self driving and the speed with it may be available versus what was told to customers. Which is to say that there’s certain Teslas that you can buy with the full self driving capabilities and people were buying that and paying up an extra fee in part because of the expectation that it was going to come right. They they didn’t, they didn’t say this vehicle has it today. They would say if you buy it now you’re going to get in and all we’ll have to do is update the software and then you’ll have the counter argument from Tesla is that that we have not told people they are buying autonomous vehicles. We have not told people that there is a certain date when it will be autonomous. We have told them that we believe that it will be autonomous at some point in the future and I think that’s where Tesla is going to come down. Obviously in this argument with the with this is going to be around internal emails and texts quite a bit. I would some engineers saying you know what we’re still five years off. I’m sure you know a comment from Musk saying we’re a year off. I’m sure that’s a big part of the the, the, the difference in whether that’s a debate, the puffery clause where companies basically are are allowed to do some of this. I mean if they outlaw puffery, I have to quit I think, right. No, no one can run for president with that, you know on either side basically. I mean puffery is, I mean it’s it’s kind of a fact a lot. Look, we’re going to see this over the next 10 to 15 years and who knows if Elon Musk and Tesla if he’s still running Tesla 10 to 15 years from now, but he is pushing full self driving as quickly as possible. Ultimately there is going to have to be a decision about moral choices. I’m not saying this is happening next year, but down the road at some point full self driving, whether it’s Tesla or somebody else, autonomous driving will no doubt lower the number of deaths and accidents anywhere. But there will be some and we will have to make a decision. Are we OK with a computer that hits somebody in an intersection versus you or I, where we say that’s human error? I’d asked Derek Hassanjhi about this. Are you of the view that the new full self driving, that’s what they call it a Tesla is, which is now powered by AI in a very different way than some of the machine learning and other programs that were used in the past is a major step change in how close we are to actually seeing this. I think it, I think it is especially for everybody that I’ve talked with who has experienced it and used it on a regular basis. Now having said that, look at Adam Jonas’s note and look at anybody talk to anybody who uses on a regular basis. They will all say the same thing. You get close in where you’re driving in neighborhoods or in the city and so forth. You still need to take control of the car. That’s that final 5% is going to take so long to to capture and figure out. So when somebody says, well it’s going to be, there’s going to be a robo taxi and it’s going to pick me up at my house and it’s going to take me here and it’s going to drop me off. That’s not happening soon. Well, you did see with cruise even though the cruise product ultimately it was halted and used in San Francisco in a Geo fenced area, right. And maybe that’s what we see with Robo Taxi in a Geo fenced area, but not widespread, at least not soon, which is what many people expect.