The SEC would not comment, and the NHTSA could not be reached for comment. Shares of Tesla, which traded up 3.69% on Monday, were down 1.46% in after-hours trading.
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Separately, Tesla CEO Elon Musk went on Twitter Sunday to say he’s working on another “Top Secret Tesla Masterplan”.
Elon Musk and Tesla may have had a rough few weeks, but apparently, all it takes is a single tweet from Musk himself to turn those fortunes around. In that crash, a Tesla Model S driven by Joshua Brown was operating in semi-autonomous Autopilot mode when it failed to see a tractor trailer passing in front of it. The crash took place on May 7 and Tesla alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about the event on May 16.
“When Tesla told NHTSA about the accident on May 16th, we had barely started our investigation”, the blog post said.
The unnamed source who disclosed this information claims it happened because the company did not notify investors of the fatal accident involving the Autopilot system, which was active at the time of impact.
Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a preliminary probe into whether Tesla should have disclosed the incident as a “material” event to investors earlier, the Journal reports. The vehicle failed to see a tractor trailer passing in front of it.
Tesla also said on Monday that it was looking into a crash in Montana.
In the auto company’s blog, Tesla defended itself against implications by Fortune magazine that it had misled its investors about risks associated with its business and, specifically, Autopilot technology.
“What Tesla was doing with autopilot was saying it was far more than it was”, he said.
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Investors may have also seen the Autopilot feature as technology in development, and that errors were inevitable, which makes it a hard case, said Yoon-Ho Alex Lee, an associate professor of law at USC. Paul Grieco, one of the lawyers for the Brown family, told Reuters his firm has received calls from other Tesla owners involved in accidents, some involving autopilot and others not. Being at the helm of both companies, Musk wants to make it easy for customers to switch to clean energy while still providing the best customer experience.
