Elon Musk's car company Tesla doesn't have the greatest track record when it comes to road safety. In fact, a recent analysis of federal data concluded that Musk's car company ranks highest in fatal crash incidents. We have this information because a federal reporting rule established by the Biden administration several years ago, its purpose is to improve transparency surrounding the deployment of new autonomous technologies on America's roads. Unfortunately, now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, it seems increasingly likely that he will reject that rule, which is a huge win for Trump's new political ally, Musk.

Reuters reported Members of Trump's transition team recommended Friday that he eliminate the auto accident reporting requirement. Reuters based its reporting on a document showing that the recommendation to kill the crash reporting rule came from "a transition team tasked with creating a 100-day strategy for automotive policy." The group called the measure a mandate for "excessive" data collection. The fatal crash statistics mentioned above were also obtained from an analysis of federal data conducted by Reuters. Removing the reporting requirement has been a goal of the company for some time. Reuters reported:

In recent years, Tesla executives have discussed with Musk the need to push for scrapping the crash-reporting requirement, according to one of the sources. But since Biden officials expressed enthusiasm for the program, Tesla executives ultimately concluded that they needed to change the administration to get the requirements, according to the source.

Tesla knows the rules are unfair because it believes it reports better data than other automakers, which it says is responsible for an outsized number of crashes involving advanced driver assistance systems, one of the sources said.

Reuters also quoted Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, as saying that Tesla likely reports a "larger proportion of their incidents" than other car manufacturers. However, critics argue that Tesla's partially automated driving function, Full Self-Driving, may be the link between the high crash statistics that have hampered the car brand. The current system interrogated of the federal government.

Previous reports have found that Tesla ranks high when it comes to their involvement in fatal incidents. As previously stated, a recent analysis of NHTSA data came to the conclusion that Tesla had highest participation rate in fatal accidents of any major brand. A 2022 report released by the NHTSA itself claims that, last year, Teslas accounted for about 70 percent of car accidents involving driver assistance systems. This year, the agency published another report which found that Tesla's Autopilot function had a "critical safety gap" that could be linked to hundreds of crashes. A previous analysis of federal data published in Washington Post shows that Tesla's Autopilot function has been involved in 17 deaths and as many as 736 crashes since 2019.