Elon Musk has promise that the work of its so -called Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, would be ‘maximum transparent’. Doge’s website is proof of that, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, and now the White House adviser, said repeatedly. There, the group keeps a list of cut grants and budgets, a running score of its work.

But over the past few weeks, the New York Times has reported that Doge has not only posted big mistakes on the website – it has been credited, for example, with the saving of $ 8 billion when the contract was canceled for $ 8 million and already paid out $ 2.5 million – but also worked to remove the mistakes after the fact, the public identification.

For researchers from road safety who have been following Musk for years, the modus operandi feels known. That’s “put out a few numbers, they didn’t smell good, they turned things over,” claims Noah Goodall, an independent transport researcher. “It shouted Tesla. You feel the feeling that they are not really interested in the truth. ‘

Goodall and others have been tracing the public releases of Tesla on its autopilot and complete self-managed functions, advanced driver aid systems designed to make management less stressful and safer. According to the years, researchers claim, Tesla has released safety statistics without proper context; Promoted numbers that are impossible for outside experts to verify; has appointed favorable safety statistics that were later proven misleading; and even change the already released safety statistics retroactively. The numbers were so inconsistent that Tesla-full self-managed fans themselves took the performance of the performance of the performance.

Instead of public data releases, “What we have, these little snippets that look as researchers in context are really suspicious,” claims Bryant Walker Smith, a legal professor and engineer studying autonomous vehicles at the University of South Carolina.

Government -backed Whoopsie

Tesla’s first and most public number mixing came in 2018 when he released his first autopilot security figures after the first known death of a driver using autopilot. Immediately, researchers noted that the numbers appeared to be that drivers using autopilot were much less likely to fall than other Americans on the road, the numbers did not have a critical context.

At the time, Autopilot Adaptive Cruise Control combined, which maintains a set distance between the Tesla and the vehicle for it, and steering aid, which keeps the car centered between the track marks. But the equation does not have control over the type of car (luxury vehicles, the only kind that Tesla made at the time, is less likely to fall than others), the person who drove the car (Tesla owners were more likely to be prosperous and older, and thus less likely to shower), or the types of roads where Teslas drove (Outopilot, especially on stated highways, but likely.

The confusion did not stop there. In response to the fatal autopilot -accident, Tesla IT Hand over a few safety numbers to the National Traffic Safety Administration for Highway, the country’s traffic safety regulator. Using these figures, the NHTSA published a report indicating that Autopilot led to a 40 percent decrease in accidents. Tesla promoted the favorable statistics and even quoted it when another person died in 2018 while using autopilot.