When Missy Cummings was director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory, she published research that was highly critical of auto-piloted cars, mainly then Teslas. They were “variable and often unsafe,” she reported. Impressed, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offered her a regulatory job.
Tesla boss Elon Musk and his fans rampaged against the hiring, thousands of them signing a petition, some of them threatening to kill her and her family if she accepted.“
When Elon Musk sicced his minions on me … it got very dark very quickly.”
She took the job. A lot more had to be done, she announced “before such technology is allowed to operate without humans in direct control.”
Her research as a regulator led to her announcement that deaths and injuries in the crashes of cars on autopilot were alarmingly tied to excessive speed; deaths and injuries in human-driven cars were caused by speeding far less often. She also looked into incidents in which the cars braked for no reason, causing other cars to crash into them.
The federal safety agency folded to pressure in just a few months, ordering Cummings to recuse herself from anything to do with Tesla.
But if Musk & Minions thought she’d given up, they didn’t know Missy Cummings. A former US Navy fighter pilot, she’d flown through 11 years of rabid misogyny. Her advanced degrees in math, space science, and systems engineering might be another clue that stopping isn’t in her profile.
Now director of the Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University, Dr. Cummings is still speaking out about self-driving vehicles. “Do not drive your Teslas on Autopilot without paying full and absolute attention and keeping your hands on the wheel.”
Looking at the root of the problems she studies, Cummings points out that the companies pushing automated vehicles are run by egotistical males who are proud that they “move fast and break things,” a modus operandi that ignores public safety. Two such companies are Cruise and Waymo, sellers of robot taxis which, she announced, are four-to-eight times more likely to crash than a car driven by a human being.
The CEO of Cruise messaged her on LinkedIn about that: “I’d love to help you with this analysis. Would be great to connect and discuss this further.” Cummings wrote back, “I’d love to help you with your understanding of basic statistics, use of computer vision, and what it means to be a safe and responsible CEO of a company. Call anytime.”