Tesla's data gives doubts, Uber fights insurance and PA makes rides safer. LegalRideshare breaks it down.

Elon praising new data for full-self driving may be misrepresented. Electrek reported:

Elon Musk is praising data that he claims shows Tesla is on the verge of achieving unsupervised Full Self-Driving, when in fact, it shows it is still years away and he is misrepresenting it.

Tesla has consistently refused to share any data regarding its self-driving progress. That's despite more recently starting to use “miles between necessary disengagement”, sometimes called “miles between critical disengagement”, as a metric to track progress and claiming x multiplicators in miles between critical disengagement in recent updates without any actual data to back it up.

There are no prior versions of Tesla FSD over the last 3 years that would add up to a 3x improvement in miles between critical disengagement. We can forget about “5 to 10x.”

An Uber-led coalition is running campaigns to lower insurance costs. NY Post reported:

Citizens for Affordable Rates is particularly supporting city legislation that would reduce the minimum liability coverage taxi and ride-share drivers are required to carry from a whopping $200,000 to $50,000.

The measure is sponsored by Councilwoman Carmen De La Rosa, whose northern Manhattan district that includes Washington Heights and Inwood has a large constituency of for-hire drivers.

Ride-share app Uber is bankrolling the group's first ads on TV/cable, digital/social media channels plus all the major streaming services (Amazon Prime, Tubi, Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Sling, Paramount+ HBO Max Pluto TV) in the New York City and Albany regions.

PA is proposing a new law to help with rider safety. Penn Live reported:

To make the process of getting in the right car more manageable and safer, state Representative Ann Flood (R-Northhampton) has proposed “Sami's Law,” which would require Uber and Lyft to provide a barcode or other machine-readable code on the outside of a vehicle to help minimize the risk of patrons getting in the wrong car.

The safety of ride-share apps has been under criticism after the death of 21-year-old Samantha Josephson, in South Carolina in 2019. Josephson had ordered an Uber but got into the wrong car, which she mistook for her ride. The “fake” driver used child locks on the door to prevent her from leaving, ultimately kidnapping and murdering her.

According to a Jan. 13 memorandum, several states have started enacting similar versions of Sami's Law. In 2019, South Carolina's Samantha L. Josephson Ridesharing Safety Act required ride-share vehicles to display license plate numbers on the front and penalized those misrepresenting themselves as authorized drivers.

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