Tesla stock jumped on Monday following a report that President elected Donald Trump’s transition team intends to make the drafting of a federal policy on the regulation of self driving cars among its first orders of business at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
As of 6:11 a.m. ET, Tesla stock was up 7.98% in U.S. premarket trading after the release of the Bloomberg News report, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
We cannot independently confirm this report and have called both the Trump transition team and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is responsible for self driving technologies as part of the Transportation Department, for comments.
Elon Musk has emerged as the leading proponent in the business world for Trump’s presidential comeback ahead of this month’s elections. This technology entrepreneur stands to benefit from the good relationship he has cultivated with the Republican leader, who had earlier occupied the presidency from 2017 to 2021.
Last week Trump named Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to the helm of the new Department of Government Efficiency, better known colloquially as “DOGE.” Trump said the department would seek to root out government “bureaucracy,” dismantle “excessive” rules and eliminate “wasteful” spending.
But a federal framework for how self-driving vehicles would be regulated would go a long way toward helping Musk’s Tesla, which has promised fully autonomous vehicles for several years but has yet to produce an automobile that can drive itself without human intervention.
The long-term plan for Tesla is to create a fleet of “robotaxis”a fleet of autonomous vehicles designed to move people around with no need for human oversight.
Last month, Musk introduced Tesla’s long-anticipated robotaxi concept the “Cybercab “, a $30,000 two seater with no steering wheels or even pedals.
Tesla has fierce competition in the robotaxi market from Google’s Waymo arguably one of the few companies to successfully launch self-driving services to date.
He made the remark at an event revealing Tesla’s Cybercab and “Robovan” vehicles, adding he expects Tesla will deploy “unsupervised” Full Self Driving technology in Texas and California next year in the Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles.
FSD stands for Full Self Driving, a set of advanced driver assistance system features available today for Tesla electric vehicles in a “supervised” format. Today, FSD requires a human driver expected to be ready to intervene in the driving process at all times.
Trump’s transition team is looking for policy leaders for the Department of Transportation to help come up with a federal regulatory framework on autonomous vehicles, according to Bloomberg.
Those on the reported shortlist include former Uber executive Emil Michael and Republican Representatives Sam Graves of Missouri and Garret Graves of Louisiana, according to Bloomberg.
