Two unconnected federal budget cuts send a strange message about Elon Musk’s goals at the “Department of Government Efficiency.” In a move widely criticized as a conflict of interest, DOGE has ordered at 10% cut at the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, which oversees vehicle safety, including a near 50% cut to the small team overseeing self-driving car safety. This team has multiple ongoing investigations of Tesla, run by Elon Musk.
In addition, Colorado Public Radio reports that orders are going out from the General Services Administration to shut down EV chargers at federal buildings (confirmed at the Denver Federal Center.) Such a move would have a negative effect on the EV transition in which Tesla has been the overwhelming leader, and Musk has been the biggest booster.
There was much speculation that Musk would want to reign in regulation of self-driving cars, as Tesla has major ambitions there. It has claimed it will deploy a robotaxi service in Austin by June, partly because Texas has very minimal regulation of such cars. Currently, most regulation of self-driving is done by the states, which licence cars and control rules of the road. California has detailed regulations, while Texas and Arizona have few. NHTSA and the federal government regulate vehicle sales and safety. Self-driving vehicles are vehicles, and whether they are safe seems like a federal matter, but the vehicles are doing the driving and following the rules of the road which is a state matter.
Federal regulation, however, could preempt state regulations and create a normalized set of rules across the nation. This would be easier for companies to comply with, but it would end the “jurisdictional competition” where states experiment with different rules to learn what’s right. That competition has enabled the initial launch of self-driving cars. Even so, there have been multiple efforts to draft federal regulations in each congress, but all have failed in committee.
It has been speculated with Musk’s newfound power, which he doesn’t seem to fear using to benefit his companies, he might push for lightweight federal regulations so that Tesla can’t be free to do its thing. Curiously though, the ideal situation for that would be to slightly beef up the federal agency and shut down the state ones. The DOGE pen strikes fear in the heart of all federal departments–keep DOGE happy or get sliced in half. Now that this has been done, the pen doesn’t create as much fear, unless specific individuals can be fired.
Charging At Offices
The shutdown of office chargers is a strange one. For the EV transition to succeed, charging needs to be easy and cheap. The two best places to do that are at home and at work (or commuter parking lots.) There, cars are parked for long periods, allowing slower Level 2 charging, which is vastly cheaper than the fast charging which get all the attention, and also much more convenient. Charging happens while you sleep or work, and you just park where you normally park. Most offices give charging free to employees and guests as a nice perk, but if they want to charge for it, the cost of providing it is usually much lower than the cost of public chargers. Much lower as in only 1/3rd as much.
The huge win of office charging, however is that it’s done in the daytime. Today, that’s not a win as night power is cheaper, but soon mid-day power is going to be the cheapest, coming from surplus solar power. In fact, for 20% of hours last year, wholesale power prices at mid-day became negative, meaning some power generation companies had to pay users to take their power, since it’s not easy to turn down certain types of power plants. This is due to the large solar surplus that comes when you build a lot of cheap solar and have more than you can use at the peak, from 10am to 2pm local standard time. It’s an even bigger win when a company has solar panels at their facility, as power from those panels can be used directly without paying high distribution costs to the power utility. In the future, we’re going to want as many EVs as possible to to charge mid-day, and for commuters that means at the office.
If operating these chargers for free to staff is a problem, many of them can charge the staff money to cover costs. Shutting the chargers down makes little sense, and Musk should know that. He’s very much been a booster of the EV transition–perhaps the biggest one in the world–so it will be odd if he doesn’t move to roll this back.
