Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Tuesday, June 24.
For the better part of Monday, most of the coverage of Elon Musk's invitation-only Tesla robotaxi test run in Austin, Texas, on Sunday portrayed the event as a big success. Tesla shares then rose 8.2 percent after Wall Street analysts wrote nice things — and continued to hype Tesla as a technology, not automotive, stock play.
But then journalists, including our own Laurence Iliff, began to pick up on postings on social media showing Tesla robotaxis that appeared to violate traffic laws.
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A critic of Tesla's self-driving technology, Dan O'Dowd, said he saw two social media videos of driving errors by robotaxis, Iliff wrote. O'Dowd called the two events "safety critical errors" in a post on X. He said such errors shouldn't occur in just one day of driving by a limited number of autonomous vehicles.
The story expanded to other news outlets, including Bloomberg, which in turn got the attention of regulators at NHTSA.
The agency told Bloomberg it is aware of the incidents and is in contact with the company to gather additional information. The incidents occurred even though Musk said last week that Tesla would be "super paranoid about safety."
In another Tesla story, a Detroit suburb last week successfully ordered the removal of about 200 Teslas from a holding lot at an aging shopping mall over a zoning issue. It's a good bet folks at Tesla's Detroit 3 competitors — all of them headquartered less than 25 miles away — found this spat in their backyard to be entertaining.
Another Ford Motor Co. recall made news today. The automaker is recalling 132,914 2020-25 Lincoln Aviator crossovers in the U.S. because of inadequate adhesion of the C-pillar trim appliques and window division bars, NHTSA said. This is Ford's 81st U.S. recall so far this year. Among automakers, Volkswagen Group is a distant second with 15 callbacks, NHTSA data shows.
Finally, another nasty factory versus dealership legal battle is emerging in New Jersey, where a 2-year-old dealership is fighting a termination notice from Mitsubishi Motors. Eric Freedman tells us more in this story.
That's it for now. Have a great rest of your day.
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— Philip Nussel, online editor
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