Dr. Missy Cummings was a recent Biden administration pick for a senior advisor position at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). She is also a clear Tesla Autopilot skeptic and has stated some extreme and alarming things on the matter. Although she stated this in 2020 and the video is a couple of years old, it’s making waves on Twitter, and what she said is seriously disturbing — even as a joke.
Dr. Missy Cummings: Tesla should put an electric cattle prod in Autopilot to make sure drivers pay attention pic.twitter.com/wi6fpxZHcl
— Whole Mars (@WholeMarsBlog) January 12, 2022
The video panel discussion in which she took part was published in 2020, but news of that panel is floating around Twitter and I am disgusted, honestly. In the virtual panel with Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE), Cummings said:
“Unfortunately, the Milgram studies prevent us from putting an electric cattle prod into the seats of cars, which is what I would vote for.”
The Milgram studies or experiment was a series of social psychology experiments in 1961 that measured the willingness of participants (men ages 20–50) to obey an authority figure who told them to perform actions that conflicted with their conscience. In the study, the participants were told that they were helping with another, unrelated experiment in which they had to administer electric shocks to a learner. Although the shocks were fake, the participants didn’t know this and they were told that the shocks were gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal if they had been real.
In response to this comment, Edward Neidermeyer giggled. Neidermeyer has been critical of Tesla and Elon Musk for at least 14 years, when he ran a “Tesla Death Watch” blog series. The idea back then (in 2008) was that it was only a matter of days until Tesla went bankrupt.
Along with Niedermeyer and Dr. Cummings, Dr. Michael Nees, and Dr. Michael Clamann were also on the panel.
Recap: this video documents Dr. Cummings having a friendly conversation with the notorious & infamous Ed Niedermayer:
❌ who ran the “Tesla Death Watch” blog,
❌and who was accused by Tesla of a campaign of fraudulent NHTSA complaints against Tesla… pic.twitter.com/T40IRo8raq— Tesla Facts (@truth_tesla) January 12, 2022
I’ve been a target of such harassment as well but mine pale in comparison as to how my friend Omar Qazi has been treated.
As someone who has been a pedestrian all of my life, I’ve witnessed many accidents (and have even been in near misses myself) — largely from drivers not paying attention.
Dr. Cummings, who has stated before that she owns a Tesla, has been an outspoken critic of Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technology and has even gone as far as to support a group of critics on Twitter who call themselves “TSLAQ” — but eventually deleted her account after she got called out for her bias.
Many Tesla owners and supporters had several issues with her biases, including that at the time, she was on the board of directors for a direct competitor of Tesla’s in the autonomous driving space as well as her support of the cult-like anti-Tesla groups that have targeted numerous Tesla owners and supporters for years. (Disclosure: I’ve even been targeted multiple times by that group.)
“Tavi” shared a thread on Twitter with his thoughts on the matter. He pointed out that she was mocking engineers and that her views on autonomy are in direct contrast with Tesla’s approach.
Listening to this panel discussion from July 2020 — before the first Beta version of FSD was released — it would be reasonable to expect that the deployment of such software would lead to countless accidents as a result of driver distraction.
And yet… zero reported accidents!🤷🏻♂️
— Tavi (@tavi_chocochip) January 12, 2022
Tavi also pointed out that Dr. Cummings will probably never support any type of adaptive driver-assist system that isn’t Level 5, yet isn’t concerned as to how Level 5 will be achieved or how many road casualties will happen until Level 5 vehicles become widely available.
To close, note that Dr. Cummings never genuinely answered Neidermeyer’s question about how she would suggest keeping drivers focused on driving when using high-level driver-assist systems. Neidermeyer initially laughed at her joke, then waited for a genuine response, but got nothing and had to scramble with another statement of his own. That seems to indicate that she has no solution in mind beyond what Tesla is already doing (various audio and visual warnings to pay attention and the interior camera watching where the driver is looking and potentially taking away their FSD software access). Or she wasn’t joking.
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