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NHTSA’s incoming senior safety adviser has a serious anti-Tesla Autopilot and FSD bias
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has recently confirmed that Duke University professor Missy Cummings is poised to be named as its new senior safety adviser. While her credentials as a computer science professor and background as a person knowledgeable about autonomous driving technologies would likely be an essential resource for the NHTSA, Dr. Cummings has exhibited something quite peculiar in social media — She appears to have a serious bias against Tesla, particularly surrounding the company’s Autopilot and Full Self Driving programs.
Over the years, Dr. Cummings, through her personal Twitter account, frequently posted overtly negative statements about Tesla, its vehicles, and its CEO Elon Musk. A number of Tesla owners and supporters who claimed to have not interacted with Dr. Cummings online also observed that they seem to have been preemptively blocked by the incoming NHTSA safety official.
Everybody has a personal bias about something they are passionate about. As such, it is understandable for the Duke University professor to adopt a skeptical stance on Tesla and its Autopilot and FSD programs. There is such a thing as a healthy dose of skepticism, after all. However, or at least based on the incoming NHTSA senior safety official’s Twitter feed, Dr. Cummings appears to have crossed the line from objective to subjective when it comes to Tesla and its technologies. The same goes for her stance regarding CEO Elon Musk. In March 2020, for example, Dr. Cummings seemingly joked about needing someone to stop her from punching Elon Musk in the face.
Punching jokes aside, the Duke University professor also stands as a present member of Veoneer, a Swedish LIDAR company. Publicly available SEC disclosures indicate that Dr. Cummings has received restricted stock units in Veoneer worth about $400,000 a year at present market prices. Considering that Tesla is a company directly competing with Veoneer in the way that it is developing autonomous driving systems with only a vision-based system, there seems to be a conflict of interest at play.
It should be noted that Dr. Cummings’ seat at Veoneer was not disclosed when she published a paper (which was later updated to remove inaccurate details about a fatal Tesla crash) criticizing systems such as Autopilot for their possible dangers. And so far, the incoming NHTSA senior safety adviser has not shared if she would be leaving her post at the Swedish LIDAR company, especially since she would soon be advising a US safety agency on driver-assist systems that adopt both LIDAR and non-LIDAR solutions.
Interestingly enough, Dr. Cummings’ criticism of Tesla and its Autopilot and FSD programs seems to stem from the fact that the company’s vehicles lack of equipment such as the LIDAR sensors provided by Veoneer. In an appearance at The Robot Brains Podcast earlier this year, the Duke University professor remarked that she is “basically an albatross around Elon’s and Tesla’s neck” and that “Where (she’s) going after is his (Elon Musk’s) desire to drop radar off of his cars and now go to vision-only.”
Dr. Cummings further noted that “There’s no vision research out there which doesn’t think that’s crazy and is gonna kill someone.” In a 2019 tweet, the incoming NHTSA safety official also noted that the NHTSA should require Tesla to disable Autopilot, since it “easily causes mode confusion.” This was a similar take from her post in 2018 when she noted that Elon Musk’s Tesla is the only “killer robot” present today.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has noted on Twitter that the Biden administration’s appointment of Dr. Cummings as a senior safety official for the NHTSA is quite “odd,” and in a later post, Musk also observed that “Objectively, her track record is extremely biased against Tesla.” In response to Musk’s post, the incoming senior safety official for the NHTSA noted that she was “happy to sit down and talk with you (Musk) anytime.” Hopefully, such a discussion could really happen with as little bias from both sides as possible, and with absolutely zero punches being thrown at the Tesla CEO.
The NHTSA’s appears to have its eye on Tesla recently. Earlier this month alone, and as the agency’s probe on several Autopilot crashes on stationary emergency vehicles continued, the NHTSA asked Tesla to explain why it rolled out a safety improvement to Autopilot through an over-the-air software update without issuing a recall.
This was quite an interesting question from the NHTSA, seeing as the Autopilot update was done as proactive measure that would allow Teslas to operate in a safer manner on the road, not as a response to a defect. This was despite Tesla accounting for only nine crash injuries with first responder vehicles in the past 12 months, a small fraction of the 8,000 injuries that were reported by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) involving a stationary emergency vehicle in the United States in a year.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner in Los Angeles dominated the company’s global usage rankings after just one year, proving the concept is more than just a one-off novelty location that will fade away.
The performance could incite the company to build more locations, something that CEO Elon Musk has hinted at for some time.
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner delivered 21.2 GWh of energy in its first year of operation, the company’s head of Charging, Max de Zegher, revealed on X. Of the top 10 most utilized Supercharger locations in Tesla’s global infrastructure, the Diner in Los Angeles was the most used by drivers, and it wasn’t particularly close:
Tesla Diner opened exactly 1 year ago. Inspiring that futuristic places like this exist.
It’s our highest usage Supercharger in the world: 21.2 GWh delivered in a year, 1.6k sessions/day.
Top 10 Superchargers by energy delivered: https://t.co/9YvJ8lw696 pic.twitter.com/koB3AUJHws
— Max (@MdeZegher) July 21, 2026
On its launch day one year ago, nobody was too sure what the Tesla Diner would be about. It seemed like an interesting concept, and considering it had been in the works for years, it was a highly anticipated launch that many were looking forward to.
Based on its success, we could see additional Diners with Superchargers built throughout the United States, and potentially beyond. Musk has said on several occasions that the company would be willing to bring the Diner idea to more markets.
Tesla makes major change at Supercharger Diner amid epic demand
Of the markets that Musk has mentioned, both Palo Alto and Austin have come to be perceived as ideal selections. However, there are no concrete plans as of now to build new Supercharger Diners anywhere; the location on Santa Monica Boulevard will remain the exclusive spot to pick up Tesla-inspired eats, at least for the time being.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner probably just secured more locations
