An interview with CS professor and ex-NHTSA adviser Missy Cummings, who says people are “over-trusting” Tesla's Autopilot, GM's Super Cruise, and other systems
Missy Cummings, who spent more than a year at the federal auto safety agency, said that drivers were putting …
Context & Ripple Effects
Missy Cummings speaks from inside the regulator she once advised: her warning that drivers over-trust both Tesla's Autopilot and GM's Super Cruise lands amid a wave of lawsuits accusing Tesla of dangerously overhyping its self-driving software and years after the NTSB pinned a fatal 2016 Tesla crash on driver over-reliance on Autopilot.
The interview also revives an old structural complaint. The [[a:943003|IIHS flagged as far back as 2019 that names like Autopilot lead drivers to overestimate what the cars can do]], and experts have repeatedly noted there is no public data to verify automakers' own safety claims — a gap Cummings' insider view puts a face on.
First-order effects
- GM's Super Cruise gets pulled into the same criticism as Tesla's Autopilot for the first time in this coverage — the problem is framed as driver trust in Level 2 systems generally, not one company's marketing.
- Cummings' year-plus tenure at NHTSA lends weight to the earlier reporting on how hard the agency has found it to regulate Tesla's self-driving features.
Second-order effects
- Automakers marketing hands-off features now face a credibility test from regulators-turned-critics at exactly the moment Tesla is defending itself in court over Autopilot claims.
- With no independent safety data available, insurers, litigants, and NHTSA investigators all fall back on the same contested manufacturer claims, sharpening pressure for third-party verification.
Third-order effects
- If expert consensus keeps converging on over-trust as the core hazard, the likely endgame is mandatory disclosure of system performance data — turning the current audit gap into a regulated requirement rather than a press argument.
- Naming conventions like Autopilot may become a regulatory liability themselves, pushing the industry toward standardized terminology that states what a system cannot do, not what it sounds like it can.
The trend: Driver-assistance systems are moving from a marketing-claims debate toward a governance fight, as former regulators and safety bodies push for independently verifiable performance data.