Tesla fined for repeatedly failing to help UK police over driving offences

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r44zpprg7o

82 99 6 months ago

bbc.co.uk

cjs_ac• 6 months ago

The British arm of Elon Musk's electric car giant has faced multiple criminal court proceedings over the past two years linked to alleged road traffic offences.
Tesla offers its vehicles on long-term leases, and in such a scenario the leasing company is typically the registered keeper of the car.
Drivers of rented or company cars caught speeding have to be named before they can face prosecution and companies which fail to return paperwork to police can be prosecuted instead.

AlexandrB• 6 months ago

Given that this is coming out of the UK, I thought it was going to be about some Orwellian request for Tesla to detect speeding and report it to the police. It's actually a much more reasonable situation where Tesla is failing to identify drivers of leased/rented cars and Tesla clearly seems in the wrong.

Tesla offers its vehicles on long-term leases, and in such a scenario the leasing company is typically the registered keeper of the car.
Drivers of rented or company cars caught speeding have to be named before they can face prosecution and companies which fail to return paperwork to police can be prosecuted instead.

dmix• 6 months ago

More specifically Tesla basically just paid a small set of automated speeding camera fines on behalf of their leasing customers, which include some glorified late charges because they didn't reply promptly.

EmptyCoffeeCup• 6 months ago

Very happy - the £100 fine isn't the problem, it's the points/day-wasted-on-useless-course that is the real deterrent to speeding.

And before people say "think of the children" and "I learned something I should have already known on the course" - Speed limits are increasingly being changed for political reasons: Safety has nothing to do with it, therefore, these arguments no longer stand (my local authority is determined to make cars as slow as buses, and is more than happy to "set aside" any suggestions that they do not do this).

yakz2• 6 months ago

Seems like some kind of weird quirk that the government doesn't already have this information readily available. Why isn't there a registration process for the person that leased the car?

oakesm9• 6 months ago

If you lease a car the owner of the vehicle isn't the driver, but the lease company itself. Tesla was contacted to provide the drivers name (as is their legal obligation) and when they didn't they were fined.

Exactly the same is true if you own the car outright. You as the owner of the vehicle will be contacted and asked to provide the details of the person who was driving at the time.

short_sells_poo• 6 months ago

I just realized something: doesn't this allow the actual drivers to escape the non-monetary penalties?

In the UK, if a driver is caught speeding, they'll (generally) also get points on their license and after accumulating 12 points, they'll (generally) lose their license for a while. Points decay on some frequency which I forget.

Anyway, what's to stop someone from driving a company car and then just paying the fines via the company and refusing the name the driver?

wakawaka282• 6 months ago

They need to change their system to add a layer of indirection for leases, or a second field to record the lessee.

monooso• 6 months ago

The answer you seek is right there in the article (emphasis mine):

Tesla offers its vehicles on long-term leases, and in such a scenario the leasing company is typically the registered keeper of the car.
Drivers of rented or company cars caught speeding have to be named before they can face prosecution and companies which fail to return paperwork to police can be prosecuted instead.

A company leases the car, and that car may then be available to multiple employees. The police need the company to confirm which employee was driving the vehicle at the time of the office.

yakz2• 6 months ago

The answer is not in the article. The question is: why isn't there a registration process for the person that leased the car? How are rented or company cars even relevant, since that's a different company between Tesla and the driver that would have the information about the driver? It seems like a weird quirk that there's not a registration process closer that leads somewhere closer to the actual driver. Is it a privacy issue? Is it just because enforcement is easier against a larger company?

wizzwizz42• 6 months ago

The police should have information on people who have broken the law (assuming the laws are reasonable and proportionate – for the moment, let's make that assumption). The police should not have information on non-criminals, except as far as it is genuinely necessary for an investigation. (To the extent that the police do things other than investigating crimes and making arrests, the relevant information should be compartmentalised and handled separately.) I am willing to tolerate large amounts of inefficiency, and even some bad guys getting away, if it ensures that the police do not begin to get results by looking only under the street light (which, if nothing else, will lead to sophisticated offenders getting away more easily). Pre-emptively requesting records just in case they're needed is a very, very bad practice, and we must oppose it if we want to live in a free society.

This is also why I tolerate the widespread use of CCTV cameras, but strongly oppose CCTV networks. Closed-circuit television needs to be closed-circuit, with friction of access requests proportionate to the amount of footage requested, or it goes from an accountability tool to a mass surveillance tool.

jen205• 6 months ago

While I largely agree, this isn't a question of having broken the law or not.

The registration is _literally something issued by the DVLA_, so of course government agencies have access to it. The problem in this specific case is where the registration information is not enough to indicate the likely driver.

londons_explore3• 6 months ago

For context for international readers, the UK has a lot of speed cameras and other automated ways to give out fines.

These get sent by snailmail to the 'owner'[simplification] of the vehicle using a government database. The owner must then, within a deadline, say who was driving the vehicle at that date and time.

If the owner fails to say who was driving, they have committed a criminal offence, and will be fined.

It looks like Tesla has in a bunch of cases not declared the driver on time. I'm willing to bet that's due to them just being slack with records in some cases - for example loaner cars, offences which occurred on the same day as a sale from person A to person B, etc.

18 offences across the whole fleet of >100k cars isn't much really, when you consider ~30% of motorists receive a fine in any given year.

philwelch5• 6 months ago

That’s a horrible system. Britain used to be famous for the professionalism of their police and now they can’t be bothered to make a traffic stop and give people speeding tickets face to face.

faefox• 6 months ago

They're sort of damned if they do and damned if they don't, aren't they? If they make traffic stops for speeding people will moan about how they're just trying to meet quotas or ask why they aren't going after "real criminals."

People just want to drive irresponsibly and they will invent any reason to justify why they're the victim, actually.

watwut2• 6 months ago

There is nothing unprofessional about it. Austria and German have cameras and send the ticket to the owner of the car - based on the plates.

There is no reason to insist this must be face to face thing.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn2• 6 months ago

They do do this as well - but speeding was/is such a people killing epidemic and cameras scaled better than people and are cheaper.

starwatch• 6 months ago

I actually quite like the system. They tend to only install speed cameras at high hazard areas e.g. where fatal accidents have occurred. Also the camera's are mostly super visible - bright high-vis yellow, and there are often warning signs as you approach them.

It's quite a different story in other countries at least in terms of visibility!

mercanlIl3• 6 months ago

I’m a bit biased here, because a close friend’s mother was killed by someone speeding through a red light.

I think automated enforcement of minor driving infractions is a good thing. More efficient use of government resources. Incentivizes drivers to follow the rules of the road.

amiga3863• 6 months ago

They can still be professional, but Tory cuts made there be a lot fewer police (23,500 police cut from 2010-2019: https://www.gmb.org.uk/news/shock-figures-reveal-23500-polic...) so they don't have the manpower to sit about waiting for speeders.

The UK is not alone in using traffic cameras to enforce speed restrictions. There was a funny example in Germany where their automated cameras blur the face of any passenger... leaving them to be unable to see who was driving a UK left-hand-drive car with Animal from the Muppets in their passenger seat: https://boingboing.net/2008/10/27/german-traffic-cops.html

atonse• 6 months ago

I disagree. As much as I hate speed cameras, the way they’ve been implemented (meaning, the fact that you get a letter with evidence and it’s clear you committed the offense, and usually no points, like you might get from a cop) seems to strike a balance of fair punishment.

Now, whether they’re that effective at reducing speeding is a bigger question. Because people just slam the brakes for the 100 feet around the camera and then resume speeding.

globular-toast• 6 months ago

So now you've got two cars speeding down the road and a complete waste of limited police resources when you could just have a speed camera.

pjc503• 6 months ago

I avoid speeding issues by the one weird trick of not speeding.

Besides, money is a big factor here. If you want to make it cost-effective for someone to physically flag down speeders and ticket them, you'll have to raise the ticket fines significantly. And (sensibly) the revenue goes to HMT and not the individual police forces, avoiding America's perverse incentives, so you'd have to raise the police budget as a separate line item.

(pursuing speeders is right out - police chases are extremely discouraged for obvious safety reasons)

KptMarchewa• 6 months ago

I've never seen someone being against a system like this that wasn't pro speeding themselves.

dm319• 6 months ago

Here, you can enjoy them here:

https://youtu.be/u98oi4qThbQ?si=2MQB8dFQ2PXI10Az

pjdesno• 6 months ago

Tesla finance seems legendary in this regard. A friend here in MA got hauled down to city hall because their auto excise taxes were 3 years overdue - they're the responsibility of the owner of a leased car, in this case Tesla finance. According to the person there, the town (50K people or so) had a bunch of Tesla owners in the same boat.

sensecall4• 6 months ago

It's a ludicrous system – I've experienced it first hand.

If for some reason the letter isn't delivered (or indeed sent), the original offence is scrapped and a new offence issued for Failure to provide information.

Frustratingly, there is no obligation on the Police to provide proof of posting, and per the law, it is deemed received once sent.

Try proving you didn't receive something...

jen205• 6 months ago

That is indeed ludicrous - I bet the same does not apply to your returned information either.

doublerabbit• 6 months ago

My father worked on the early 90's contract that implemented the speed camera's on the motorway. The future road map was to make these digitally automated. Dark Fibre was laid but the plans were scrapped as the government saw it as a waste of money. This is why we are stuck with the ludicrous system.

For a long while if you were changing lanes while speeding through the camera it couldn't capture the plate. Again the government didn't care. Of course now resolved with the archaic future technology we have now.

paganel• 6 months ago

It's ludicrous that the British put up with those laws, at some point they have to assume responsibility.

belorn• 6 months ago

The primary alternative is to have signed delivery, in which case some people will simply refuse to sign it and thus prevent delivery. Signed delivery is the way the postal service usually differentiate between normal delivery which has some kind of error rate which the postal service do not take responsibility for, and the signed service which usually carry some insurance (up to a maximum) of delivery.

The US has their Service of process which is commonly seen in movies, which is often made into a joke in comedies.

A much older system is the one where by law people had to put a notice in the news paper, sometimes multiple notices, and then that was considered enough proof of delivering the notice.

It would be an interesting conversation to philosophy how a future system should be designed that can't be refused, where delivery to the recipient is guarantied, and where the sender and the delivery service must produce proof of their parts.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r4• 6 months ago

It, in reality, works just fine. Stop trying to harbour sympathy from Americans with their prebiotics traffic safety systems.

ninalanyon• 6 months ago

~30% of motorists receive a fine in any given year.

Really? Or have you (or someone else) just divided the number of fines by the number of motorists?

londons_explore3• 6 months ago

Original source:

https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/drivers-receiving...

I suspect the division method.

SomaticPirate• 6 months ago

Convicted 5 times... if this was a natural person it stands to reason their license to operate a motor vehicle would be revoked. However, a "corporate" person faces no such consequences. What is the equivalent of jail for these "corporate" entities who are more than happy to pay fines.

Stevvo• 6 months ago

"Almost 4,000 defendants have been convicted in courts in England and Wales in the last two weeks for failing to identify the driver of a vehicle under police investigation, leading to fines ranging from £1 to £1,000."

"Tesla has been convicted at least 18 times"

So, Tesla are 1 of 4000. I feel the article is missing a bigger story here to make it about Tesla.

jen205• 6 months ago

The difference is (presumably) that they are the only auto finance company doing this and therefore should have a more rigorous standard applied than the individuals who make up the remaining 3982 cases.

axel479343• 6 months ago

your car is a talking-to-the-fascist-cops machine now. truly dystopian shit

killingtime74• 6 months ago

20k in fines, so just over half of cost of 1 Model 3

Tesla fined for repeatedly failing to help UK police over driving offences

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