Tesla fans, Musk lash out at NHTSA safety advisor as biased

Cummings in 2020 called it laughable that Tesla had promoted the era as the year of the robotaxi, saying that her lab’s experiments showed Autopilot 'was not even close to being ready'. —Bloomberg

Elon Musk and thousands of Tesla Inc’s die-hard fans and customers are in an uproar about NHTSA’s new pick as its senior safety advisor.

Their target is Mary "Missy” Cummings, a Duke University professor critical of Tesla’s Autopilot software who was chosen this week for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration role. The former US Navy pilot is also on the board of Veoneer, a Swedish company that is being acquired by Qualcomm Inc. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, has scorned the laser-based technology called lidar that’s promoted by Veoneer and has been adopted by rival automakers.