Horror as Tesla crashes near busy LA Trader Joe's killing one and injuring others trib.al/2UeeT01

We don’t know what’s in Tesla's “Radar Saves Us” document. But the title alone tells you the shape of it, and you don’t need much imagination to see why NHTSA wants it badly enough to name it in a federal information request. An internal Tesla document called “Radar Saves Us” almost certainly contains Tesla’s own analysis showing that radar, or radar fused with vision, catches situations that cameras alone miss. If that analysis touches the exact failure mode in these nine crashes, cameras washed out by glare, fog, or dust, then NHTSA has something powerful: evidence that Tesla internally understood a camera-only system had a safety gap, understood a proven fix, and shipped the camera-only system to 3.2 million cars anyway. That’s the difference between a design choice and a defect the manufacturer knew about. It’s exactly what turns an Engineering Analysis into a recall. This is the through-line I’ve been reporting for years, now landing in a regulatory file. Musk privately admitted radar-plus-vision is safer in a DM to me (below). Engineers begged him to keep radar. Tesla removed it, marketed the camera-only system as able to handle “whiteout conditions” and “all conditions,” and softened the on-screen warning when the cameras go blind. People have died in the conditions the cameras can’t handle, including a pedestrian killed by a Tesla on FSD. Tesla has until August 12 to hand over the document and answer for the marketing. As I have often stated, I have very little hope of NHTSA holding Tesla’s feet over the fire when it comes to FSD. However, I have to admit that this line of inquiry here is promising.