Look out, Elon Musk. Expecting rational results from regulatory agencies is often a recipe for disappointment.
Two of Mr. Musk's Tesla Model S cars burned up when road debris punctured the battery, a vulnerability not seen in other electric cars. Mr. Musk says his cars are no more fire-prone than gasoline cars. He claims to welcome a National Highway Safety Administration investigation into whether the cars are defective and warrant a recall.
Good luck with that. Mr. Musk is embroiled in a process that, he may soon discover, can quickly become more about politics than engineering. GM pickups with side-mounted gas tanks in the 1980s were necessarily more fire-prone in side collisions, yet the truck's overall safety record was exemplary and the vehicle fully complied with federal fuel-system safety standards. That didn't stop the feds from eventually ruling the trucks defective, in response to over-the-top media and interest-group allegations against the company.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc..Bloomberg
Those nearing ecstasy over the driverless car ought to sober up too. Tesla is not the only example of how unwelcoming our system of auto regulation is to new ideas. At a congressional hearing on the robotic car last week, a GM executive pleaded for "protection for auto makers and dealers from frivolous litigation for systems that meet and surpass whatever performance standards are established by the government." NHTSA's David Strickland was also present and seemed a lot more interested in extending his agency's remit to "things like, you know, navigation on an iPhone. . . . That is a piece of motor vehicle equipment and I think we have a very strong precedent."
And recall NHTSA's performance during the furor almost four years ago over alleged runaway Toyotas. Its then-overseer, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, happily participated in congressional hearings designed to flog for the benefit of trial lawyers the idea of a hidden bug in Toyota's electronic throttle control.
When the agency much more quietly came out with a report a year later debunking the idea of an electronic defect, notice how little good it did Toyota. The car maker still found it necessary to cough up $1.2 billion to satisfy owners who claimed their cars lost value in the media frenzy over a non-defect. Toyota has also seen the tide turning against it lately as it resists a deluge of accident claims.
At first, opposing lawyers were hesitant to emphasize an invisible defect that government research suggested didn't exist. That was a tactical error on their part. In an Oklahoma trial last month involving an 82-year-old woman driver, jurors awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and were ready to assign punitive damages in a complaint focused on a hypothetical bug when Toyota abruptly settled on undisclosed terms.
In another closely-watched trial set to begin in California in March, an 83-year-old female driver (who has since died from unrelated causes) testified in a deposition that she stepped on the brake instead of the gas. The judge has already ruled that if the jury decides to believe her testimony, it is entitled to infer the existence of a defect that nobody can find.
These cases, out of some 300 pending, were chosen for a reason. Study after study, including one last year by the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center, finds that elderly female drivers are inordinately prone to "pedal misapplication." If Toyota can't prevail in these cases, the company might be wise to run up the white flag and seek a global settlement that some estimate at upwards of $5 billion—quite a sum for a non-defect.
Why do we mention this? These episodes describe the regulatory-cum-political thicket that Tesla wandered into when it started making cars. This thicket has served as a near-perfect barrier to entry to startup car makers for the better part of a century.
Even more so because Tesla's troubles come at a time when much bigger companies, with vast lobbying and political resources, are entering the market for high-end electric cars—including Cadillac, Porsche, BMW and Audi. Maybe this explains a note of hyperbole that has begun to creep into Mr. Musk's frequent blog postings. "If a false perception about the safety of electric cars is allowed to linger," he wrote last week, "it will delay the advent of sustainable transport and increase the risk of global climate change, with potentially disastrous consequences worldwide."
Federal regulators have been warned. They can always be denounced as climate criminals if they find the Tesla Model S defective. Maybe Mr. Musk is ready to play the political game after all.