Toronto, Ontario —Tesla gets sued in California for false advertising, the British government plans to integrate autonomous vehicles into the UK by 2025 and data showing a consistent increase in zero-emission vehicle adoption rates in Ontario, Montreal and British Columbia. This is your weekly report on the latest in electric and autonomous vehicles.
Problems Abounding
Tesla announced that the company will present a defence in court after California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) denounced the company’s autonomous system marketing as false advertising.
According to a Reuters article published Aug. 18, complaints to California’s DMV were initially filed on July 28. These claimed that Tesla failed to advertise the true capabilities and limitations of its autopilot and full-self-driving (FSD) systems, Tesla’s primary autonomous features.
In particular, the California DMV took issue with marketing claims that “the system is designed to…conduct short and long-distance trips with no action required,” and claims that the driver could hop in and set a destination, or have the car use a pre-assigned location in the driver’s calendar.
While Tesla vehicles might be fully self-driving in lab conditions, they still require full driver attention to safely function. To date, no commercially available AVs are capable of true autopilot without human input.
In other Tesla-related news, the NHTSA has announced that driving autonomous cars into real children is a bad idea. This follows a video posted on the internet where a man defended the FSD beta by having his child run in front of an FSD-enabled Tesla. While his dedication to science is commendable, Collision Repair Magazine does not endorse driving AVs into children.
To view the original DMV document, click here.
British Bots
The British government is investing over 100 million pounds to roll out fully autonomous vehicles by 2025 to improve transport infrastructure and reduce the number of transport accidents, according to an article first published by Bloomberg.
While most drivers will still require a valid license, certain exemptions have been made. Delivery vehicles will likely be the first deployment of completely autonomous vehicles on a large scale.
This push to establish autonomous vehicles in the mainstream has one particularly controversial issue – who is liable during accidents caused by autonomous vehicles? Given the lack of precedent, this is an ongoing issue that is hotly debated, worsened by controversies surrounding AVs that crash into parked vehicles, emergency vehicles and allegedly, children.
According to the British Department for Transport, investing in the self-driving industry could create up to 38,000 jobs in an industry valued around C$64.5 million.
Data drop
Zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) registrations have slightly dropped to 7.5 percent of all registrations between April to June 2022 – slightly lower than January to March 2022, which had the highest ever registrations at 8.3 percent of all new vehicles.
According to data from the S&P Global Mobility consulting firm, this decline can be attributed to a drop in battery EV registrations.
The two leading provinces in the EV market, British Columbia and Quebec saw ZEV registrations falling between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022. B.C. dropped from 17.1 percent to 15.7 percent, while Quebec dropped from 13.6 percent to 11.2 percent.
Ontario was the only province that saw a ZEV registration increase from 5.7 percent to 6.1 percent, with ZEV registrations in other provinces and territories declining. Notably, Toronto saw the sharpest increase, with a 111 percent increase in ZEV numbers.
While a drop in the quarter is observed, data suggests this is closer to a point of leveling across a period of annual growth, rather than a true drop in ZEV adoption. Expect to see more ZEVs arriving at your shops.
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