| Thanks for reading Hyperdrive, Bloomberg's newsletter on the future of the auto world. Say what you will about Elon Musk, but don't accuse him of lacking in self-confidence. He really outdid himself on Tesla's latest earnings call, sounding assured as ever about the autonomous cars he's promised for years and has yet to deliver. The first two questions posed to Musk and his executive team late Wednesday were almost identical in nature: When are more affordable Teslas coming? The second time around, an investor specifically wanted to know when Tesla will deliver a $25,000 "non-Robotaxi regular car model." Musk and Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, answered dismissively: Musk: We're not making a non-robo— Moravy: Yeah, all our vehicles today are robotaxis. Musk: I think we've made very clear that the future is autonomous. … It should be, frankly, blindingly obvious at this point, that is the future. A lot of automotive companies, most automotive companies, have not internalized this, which is surprising because we've been shouting this from the rooftops for such a long time, and it will accrue to their detriments in the future. But all of our vehicles in the future will be autonomous— Moravy: Today, even today. Musk: Yes, all the vehicles that we've really made, all the 7 million vehicles, the vast majority are capable of autonomy.
The CEO was right about one thing — he's been shouting this from the rooftops for more than half a decade. But try as he might, Musk can't speak autonomous cars into existence, and he and Moravy were overstating what Teslas are capable of today. Don't take my word for it. Read the fine print in Tesla's own shareholder deck — specifically, the footnote on one of the first pages cautioning that the feature the company calls Full Self-Driving requires active driver supervision and "does not make the vehicle autonomous." Musk and Moravy should know better than to exaggerate in this regard. Tesla offers other driver-assistance features called Autopilot that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has flagged as problematic. Why? Because there's a "critical" gap between what Tesla drivers think Autopilot can do, and what the system actually is capable of, according to the agency.  NHTSA opened a defect investigation into Autopilot in August 2021 after multiple Teslas crashed into parked police cars and fire trucks. Source: South Jordan (Utah) Police Department NHTSA offered this assessment back in April, when the regulator extended its years-long evaluation of Autopilot's safety credentials. The agency opened a query that month into whether Tesla did enough to fix 2 million cars that it recalled in December to keep drivers from misusing the system. This month, NHTSA opened another investigation into whether Tesla's higher-level driver-assist system FSD is defective after multiple crashes, one of which resulted in a fatality. That's on top of least 13 crashes involving one or more fatalities — and many more involving serious injuries — in which foreseeable misuse of Autopilot played an apparent role, according to NHTSA. The US Transportation Department isn't alone in scrutinizing these systems. Tesla disclosed early last year that it had received requests from the Justice Department for documents related to Autopilot and FSD. Tesla has occasionally signaled it's going to cool it with the autonomy talk, at least with respect to how it describes the current capability of its vehicles. FSD, for instance, became "FSD (Supervised)" in recent months. Although the nomenclature is nonsensical — if a car needs to be supervised, how is it fully self-driving? — this was at least a more up-front assessment of what the company is offering consumers. Musk and Moravy's comments were a reversion to overstating the capability Tesla's cars. We've seen time and time again in the decade since the company introduced Autopilot that these misrepresentations can have deadly consequences.  A Dodge Charger Daytona SRT concept vehicle at the 2023 New York International Auto Show. Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg Stellantis plans to operate a test fleet of electric vehicles powered with solid-state batteries in two years' time, taking a step toward potential commercialization of a technology aimed at improving EV performance. The automaker will launch a demonstration fleet of battery-powered Dodge Charger Daytona vehicles using solid-state cells made by Factorial Energy, the Woburn, Massachusetts-based startup told Bloomberg. "This is a very critical step for them to test in a real world condition," Factorial CEO Siyu Huang said. The company aims to start mass production of its battery cells as soon as 2029. | 
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