By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Tesla’s autonomous-vehicle strategy is about to become a playbook for the broader automotive industry on sidestepping the National Transportation Safety Board’s safety recommendations and bending the prior administration’s toothless AV regulations to its will. But when Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta software kills a pedestrian, regulators must do more than say, “Uh-oh”; they must get to the bottom of what went wrong. That requires a deep dive into the software — a task for which regulators today are ill-equipped. Ensuring the public safety requires rewriting the rules and arming the regulators to enforce them.