Tesla has answered NHTSA’s Cybercab special order by its October 30 deadline.
There’s a catch. A new agency filing shows the company asked to keep every document in its Question 8 response confidential.
According to an October 30 NHTSA record, the remaining documents responsive to Question 8 carry a confidential business information request from Tesla covering the entirety of each document. That placeholder is what the public can see. The actual Question 8 pages are not on the open docket.
Question 8 goes to how Cybercab was certified. In the September 10 special order, NHTSA told Tesla to explain, for each federal motor vehicle safety standard it listed as applicable, specifically how it determined the Cybercab complies, which subpart it certified to when a standard offers more than one path, and whether it used engineering analyses, physical tests, simulations, or other means.
Federal regulators opened the Cybercab audit on September 3, the same day Tesla began offering commercial service in the vehicle, according to the order. Tesla North covered that probe when it surfaced. The special order followed on September 10, turning the audit into a sworn information demand due September 30.
Tesla later asked for more time. A public NHTSA memo shows the company sought an extension to November 20, and the agency instead pushed the deadline to October 30, as Tesla North reported. The October 30 confidentiality placeholder lands on that revised due date.
Nothing in the new record publishes Tesla’s answers to the other requests in the special order, either. Those public questions still cover whether temporarily attached human driver controls were part of any certification, which standards Tesla treats as inapplicable, how a car without a foot-operated brake meets the service-brake rule, and how Cybercab complies without a Part 555 exemption.
NHTSA has not said in this filing whether it will grant or deny Tesla’s confidentiality request, and it has not found that Cybercab breaks any standard. The special order itself warned that failing to respond fully or truthfully can bring civil penalties.
Should NHTSA keep Tesla’s Question 8 Cybercab certification methods secret, or put them on the public docket?
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