The Week in Business: Trouble for Tesla?
Amazon Objects to a Union
Amazon will appear before the National Labor Relations Board this week to present its objections to the Amazon Labor Union’s victory in a unionization vote at a Staten Island warehouse in April. Despite the retail giant’s determination to quash organizing at the warehouse, known as JFK8, workers there voted by a wide margin to form a union. Amazon filed a list of more than two dozen objections with the N.L.R.B.; they include allegations that the union “intentionally created hostile confrontations” by interrupting company-mandated meetings, which Amazon used to resist the union. Experts say it is rare for the N.L.R.B. to overturn an election result.
Robust Audience for the Jan. 6 Hearings
More than 19 million viewers and counting tuned in to the prime-time House Select Committee hearing on the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks on Thursday, the first of several that will take place in the coming weeks. The audience numbers, according to preliminary ratings figures from Nielsen, were comparable to those for events like a “Sunday Night Football” game or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. ABC, CBS and NBC aired the hearing as special reports, but Fox News, the most-watched cable news network, decided not to carry any of the hearing live (though Fox Business Network, which draws a much smaller audience, did). Instead, its star commentators played the hearing live in a split screen as they weighed in. “It’s deranged, and we’re not playing along,” Tucker Carlson said.
The Issues With Tesla’s Autopilot System
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Claims of safer driving. Tesla cars can use computers to handle some aspects of driving, such as changing lanes. But there are concerns that this driver-assistance system, called Autopilot, is not safe. Here is a closer look at the issue.
Driver assistance and crashes. A 2019 crash that killed a college student highlights how gaps in Autopilot and driver distractions can have tragic consequences. In another crash, a Tesla hit a truck, leading to the death of a 15-year-old California boy. His family sued the company, claiming the Autopilot system was partly responsible.
Shortcuts with safety? Former Tesla employees said that the automaker may have undermined safety in designing its Autopilot driver-assistance system to fit the vision of Elon Musk, its chief executive. Mr. Musk was said to have insisted that the system rely solely on cameras to track a car’s surroundings, instead of also using additional sensing devices. Other companies’ systems for self-driving vehicles usually take that approach.
Information gap. A lack of reliable data also hinders assessments on the safety of the system. Reports published by Tesla every three months suggest that accidents are less frequent with Autopilot than without, but the figures can be misleading and do not account for the fact that Autopilot is used mainly for highway driving, which is generally twice as safe as driving on city streets.
What Else?
Target said it would take a profit hit to clear out inventory as shoppers’ habits shifted. Spirit Airlines delayed a shareholder vote on its merger with Frontier Airlines as JetBlue Airways tries to cut in with a rival bid. Howard Schultz, Starbucks’s interim chief executive, said he was considering ending a policy that allows noncustomers to use store bathrooms.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/12/business/the-week-in-business-trouble-for-tesla.html