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Emmanuel Perrin was named to the top post of the Richemont-owned brand in April.

Emmanuel Perrin is humble.

Despite a rich résumé that includes a 33-year career at Richemont heading its specialist watchmakers group, serving as chief executive officer of Cartier North America and in several executive roles at Van Cleef & Arpels, he has no desire to be in the spotlight.

So when he was tapped in April to become CEO of Panerai, he made it clear that rather than promoting himself, he would be wholly committed to upholding the legacy of the brand he was charged to oversee.

“I’m only the third CEO in the Richemont era of the company,” he said. “The only mark that I want to make, working with the team at Panerai, is to be a custodian and make sure we hand the maison over to the next generation in stronger shape than when we inherited it.”

Panerai has a rich history. It traces its roots to 1860 when Giovanni Panerai opened a workshop, shop and school of watchmaking in Florence, Italy. Starting in 1910, the company served as the secretive supplier to the commandos of the Italian Navy, starting out crafting precision instruments such as gun sights and luminescent compasses before creating its first watches in 1935.

“That shaped and morphed the DNA of Panerai,” Perrin said.

Until 1993, the company exclusively created timepieces to meet the Italian Navy’s specifications: luminescent, water resistant, extended power reserve and hardy construction. But on Sept. 10 of that year, Panerai introduced its first commercial watches, including the Luminor, which remains its signature to this day.

Panerai was purchased by Richemont in 1997 and today the brand has headquarters and manufacturing facilities in Switzerland as well as an office in Milan.

This rich history is showcased in “The Depths of Time,” an exhibit that debuted Thursday at Casa Panerai, the company’s New York City flagship. The exhibit debuted in Florence on Sept. 10 — the date and location were chosen to commemorate the brand’s move into civilian watches in its original home city — and will remain in Manhattan through Nov. 9 before moving on to Miami.

Perrin proudly showed off the extensive collection of archival materials that include personal letters between the Panerai family and the Italian Navy, technical drawings, early catalogs and historical photographs. Compasses and depth gauges are displayed alongside archival watches and patent certificates.

The exhibition ends with a close-up view of the recently launched Luminor Marina Militare, a reinterpretation of the watch created for the Italian Navy and the versions introduced to the public in 1993.

Panerai still works with the Italian Navy, offering an exclusive vetted collection created just for its commandos. But that represents only a small piece of the business, with 99 percent of sales coming from the commercial collection.

But while targeted to consumers, everything that Panerai creates is rooted in this military history. That means the watches offer cutting-edge Swiss precision technology blended with Italian design.

Because of their history servicing the Navy, the watches are large, ranging from 38 millimeters to 47 millimeters, are rigorously tested to be water-resistant to as much as 500 meters, and are durable. “We make big, tough watches,” Perrin said.

Most of its customers are men, although some women are also fans. To appeal to females, Panerai has begun offering smaller watches, but it will never start making dainty timepieces. “If you’re looking for a diamond-studded watch, I would suggest Cartier,” he said with a smile. “But if you want a tough, mechanical watch, I think Panerai is second to none.”

For both genders, he said Panerai “needs to speak to you, to who you are and what you want to project. We are not a watch for everybody. We still make professional tool watches. We conceive them as such, to have a purpose, to have a function, to be useful, to be resistant, to be reliable. And that’s what also drives the innovation and the continuous improvement of our watches, which is how Panerai has always functioned.”

Its commitment to producing large, durable watches is perhaps the reason the U.S. is Panerai’s largest market. He said the history of the U.S. and its people are very similar to that of Panerai.

“There is a natural affinity for a watch that is big, tough, resilient and resistant. This is how the U.S. was created and you still see the ability of of the U.S. people to go through a major crisis, fall down, get back up, dust themselves off and go forward,” he said.

But one of his goals as CEO is to enhance the visibility of the Panerai brand. Although the company has developed a rabid following globally — there is a group of 30,000 people who belong to Club P, a community of Panerai watch owners and enthusiasts — it’s still under-the-radar for many people. The Club P group is meeting in New York this week and will be visiting the store to see the exhibition on Thursday.

Panerai also counts Sylvester Stallone as a fan. The actor was an early proponent of the watches, wearing them in his movies and gifting them to co-workers.

“It put the brand on the map in the U.S.,” Perrin said.

Evan so, there’s enormous room for growth, he believes. “The awareness of the maison is still very small. We have fantastic product. We have a fantastic history. We have fantastic stories to tell, but too few people know about it. There’s a new generation coming of age and we need to continue engaging with those potential customers — but by staying true to who we are. I think if you try to widen your audience too much by stretching your DNA, you lose a little bit of your soul, and the customer reacts to that.”

Panerai operates 30 stores in the U.S. market and Perrin said it may add one or two more going forward in cities such as Indianapolis — its latest opening — where there is white space. But the primary expansion in the U.S. will be with multibrand retailers, he said.

He also believes there are expansion opportunities in other parts of the world including Mexico, India and Vietnam.

But wherever Panerai goes, it will continue to lean into its heritage as a diving brand. The company has only one main ambassador, Mike Horn, a Swiss explorer and adventurer, who has worked with the brand for more than 20 years. Perrin said he would consider one day bringing a celebrity into the fold, but the relationship would have to be genuine.

“When you see celebrities changing brands from one season to the next, or from one red carpet to the next, it’s probably less relevant. But we would consider someone who naturally wears the brand and would be interested in representing it.”

It’s been nearly a year since we scooped the news that OpenAI, Google, Snowflake and Cohere were all working on artificial intelligence search products similar to the one startup Glean made a big splash with. Glean’s AI-powered search lets workers at companies easily find emails, Slack messages and other data scattered across business applications. As we said at the time, it seemed like everyone was trying to be like Glean.

Well, guess what? Everyone is still trying to be like Glean! That’s our takeaway from AI product announcements Amazon and Google made today, revealing that both tech giants have sprinkled some new AI features into their existing enterprise software products. Now they are bundling their enterprise search products with new AI features and pitching them as a way for businesses to equip all of their employees with AI.

Amazon’s new offering, Quick Suite, fuses its business-focused chatbot, Q for Business, with a product customers use to analyze corporate data with charts and graphs. Google’s new Gemini Enterprise offering includes Agentspace, the Glean clone it announced last December and launched to all customers in July. Both offerings include some new AI features and connections to more third-party applications, but these are essentially rebrandings.

What’s really happening here is that Amazon and Google are trying to chip away at the perception that it’s hard for big companies to get value from AI. By making AI sound easy to use and turning that messaging into a mantra, they hope to get a foothold with nontechnical employees in companies. That in turn could generate the kind of self-perpetuating buzz that initially helped fuel Glean’s rise.

Of course, a few months after Glean launched its first agent-building service last year, Salesforce’s Slack unit limited the service’s ability to search users’ Slack messages. That raises questions about Glean’s long-term growth prospects. It's doubtful Salesforce would take similar steps to block Amazon’s and Google’s access, though, since it has long-term agreements to rent cloud servers from both those companies.

OpenAI’s European Complaints

We’d love to hear how Google and Amazon respond to this one. OpenAI has complained to Europe’s antitrust chief, Teresa Ribera, that it is having “difficulties” competing with big tech firms, Bloomberg reported.

OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT—which as we know is far and away the dominant AI chatbot—wants the regulator to do something to stop “lock-in of customers by large platforms,” according to Bloomberg’s report.

That’s rich, given how successful ChatGPT has been. It’s a little hard to see that competition from its slower-moving rivals has hurt it, at least so far.

If any company is a threat, it’s Google, which even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledges seems to have its act together. Altman told Stratechery columnist Ben Thompson this week, “Google’s doing incredible work right now, but clearly they didn’t in that first period of time where ChatGPT got to market.” We’ll await regulators’ responses with bated breath.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday tweeted a video of his company’s first deployed massive AI system — or AI “factory” as Nvidia likes to call them. He promised this is the “first of many” such Nvidia AI factories that will be deployed across Microsoft Azure’s global data centers to run OpenAI workloads.

Each system is a cluster of more than 4,600 Nvidia GB300 rack computers sporting the much-in-demand Blackwell Ultra GPU chip and connected via Nvidia’s super-fast networking tech called InfiniBand. (Besides AI chips, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also had the foresight to corner the market on InfiniBand when his company acquired Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2019.)

Microsoft promises that it will be deploying “hundreds of thousands of Blackwell Ultra GPUs” as it rolls out these systems globally. While the size of these systems is eye-popping (and the company shared plenty more technical details for hardware enthusiasts to peruse), the timing of this announcement is also noteworthy.

It comes just after OpenAI, its partner and well-documented frenemy, inked two high-profile data center deals with Nvidia and AMD. In 2025, OpenAI has racked up, by some estimates, $1 trillion in commitments to build its own data centers. And CEO Sam Altman said this week that more were coming.

Microsoft clearly wants the world to know that it already has the data centers — more than 300 in 34 countries — and that they are “uniquely positioned” to “meet the demands of frontier AI today,” the company said. These monster AI systems are also capable of running the next generation of models with “hundreds of trillions of parameters,” it said.

We expect to hear more about how Microsoft is ramping up to serve AI workloads later this month. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott will be speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, which will be held October 27 to October 29 in San Francisco.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech after receiving reports that the software caused vehicles to run red lights or cross into wrong lanes.

The probe, which identified more than 50 reports of these kinds of violations (four of which led to injuries), is one of the first specifically targeted at Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver assistance software. The NHTSA previously opened an investigation into FSD in October 2024 after receiving reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions.

The federal safety agency in April 2024 closed an investigation into Tesla’s less-capable Autopilot system after identifying 13 fatal crashes related to the misuse of that software. A separate investigation into the efficacy of the fix Tesla issued to Autopilot remains open.

The new investigation was opened the same week that Tesla released the latest version of the software, which CEO Elon Musk has spent months hyping. This new version is supposed to incorporate training data that Tesla acquired during its limited robotaxi pilot, currently underway in Austin, Texas.

The safety agency’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said on Thursday that it has received at least 18 complaints and one media report alleging that Tesla’s FSD software failed to stop the car or stay stopped at red lights. In addition, ODI said it identified six reports from Tesla under the agency’s Standing General Order for Crash Reporting (SGO), which requires companies to submit information about crashes involving autonomous or partially autonomous cars.

ODI said it has already worked with Maryland’s Transportation Authority and its State Police to determine if some of the red light problems are repeatable, since “multiple subject incidents occurred at the same intersection in Joppa, Maryland.” Tesla has already “taken action to address the issue at this intersection,” according to the NHTSA.

ODI also said on Thursday it had identified 18 complaints, two media reports, and two SGO reports from Tesla about instances in which FSD “entered opposing lanes of travel during or following a turn, crossed double-yellow lane markings while proceeding straight, or attempted to turn onto a road in the wrong direction despite the presence of wrong-way road signs.”

ODI said it has identified six complaints, one media report, and four SGO reports where a Tesla with FSD engaged drove straight through an intersection from a turn lane, or turned from a through lane.

“Some of the reported incidents appeared to involve FSD executing a lane change into an opposing lane of travel with little notice to a driver or opportunity to intervene,” ODI wrote.

ODI opened what’s known as a “Preliminary Evaluation,” one of the first steps it can take on the way to requiring a recall. The agency said it typically tries to complete these investigations within eight months, although it’s unclear if the federal government shutdown would affect the timeline.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year reportedly made dramatic cuts to NHTSA’s vehicle automation safety staff.

Reliable Robotics is among startups hoping to revolutionize air travel by doing away with the need for human pilots on cargo, military and even passenger aircraft

Reliable Robotics is testing autonomous flight with a pilot on standby, aiming to revolutionize air travel without human pilots.

Boeing and Airbus are exploring increased automation for safety, but aren’t designing commercial jets without pilots in cockpits.

Autonomous flight for passengers faces significant technical, regulatory, and public acceptance hurdles, despite technological advancements.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—“Aircraft should fly themselves!” is scrawled on a whiteboard at Reliable Robotics’ offices here.

Recently two staff members watching on monitors tracked the flight path of a small airplane flying itself above northern California, about 40 miles away. The Cessna Caravan had a pilot aboard on standby, along with a flight-test engineer, but was otherwise on its own. They were testing a new collision-avoidance system and new radar that helps the plane see and avoid other aircraft.

If all goes as planned, Reliable Robotics eventually won’t need any pilots on board its planes. It is among startups vying to revolutionize air travel by doing away with the need for human pilots on cargo, military and maybe even passenger aircraft. Autonomous flight is being tested at companies from giant aircraft makers to small startups.

For now, cargo and military flights are the focus. Reliable recently signed a $17 million contract with the U.S. Air Force that involves testing autonomous cargo flights. Flying-taxi maker Joby Aviation also recently tested its own pilotless Cessna for the Air Force over the Pacific Ocean.

Boeing and Airbus, the world’s leading makers of large commercial jets, have separately worked on introducing more automation in their aircraft, and both say the aim is to improve safety. The two companies have also examined fully autonomous flight, but say they aren’t working on commercial-jet designs that don’t include pilots in cockpits.

Truly autonomous flight with human passengers will face a host of technical and regulatory hurdles, and—perhaps the most difficult of all—a tough sell to travelers.

Pilots, the faces and voices of safety for the flying public, reassure during startling turbulence or other in-flight scares. Their presence conveys someone is there to save the day.

“I don’t think we’re going to go full autonomy passenger operations immediately,” says Robert Rose, Reliable’s chief executive. “And the reason for that has more to do with passenger acceptance than it does the technology.”

Advances in technology over past decades have already reduced the number of people needed on the flight deck. Aviation industry officials credit automation with steady improvements in safety, including new cockpit features that have reduced pilots’ workloads and helped them avoid potentially catastrophic slip-ups. Commercial aircraft can already essentially fly themselves while on autopilot in normal conditions and practically land automatically, though pilots must plug inputs into the automation, closely monitor cockpit systems and stand by to take over flying manually if needed.

Earlier in the jet age, more pilots were on the flight deck, along with navigators and flight engineers. In recent decades regulators have generally required two pilots in the cockpits of commercial flights, one to fly and the other to monitor the operation. The Air Line Pilots Association labor union that represents aviators at U.S. and Canadian carriers argues that safety depends on having a pair of well-trained, well-rested pilots ready to intervene with cockpit automation and jointly resolve emergencies like engine failures.

An Airbus project has centered on potentially reducing the number of pilots needed in the cockpit to one during certain phases of flight. It is called extended minimum crew operations, or eMCO. Airbus says its aim is to reduce fatigue by building cockpit features that would allow pilots to rest while one of them flies during certain phases of cruise, the high-altitude portion of flight.

The European plane maker has been working on modifying its A350, a large wide-body jet used on long-haul international flights, with the expectation cargo carriers might use such a system first. The systems would involve “smart automation” features that kick in, for instance, when a plane depressurizes—causing it to descend to 10,000 feet, sending an emergency transmission to air-traffic control and avoiding other aircraft on the way to lower altitude. Airbus said the smart feature is already in service on the A350.

On long-haul flights, the wide-body planes such as the A350 might carry three or four pilots. The eMCO system would require only one in the cockpit during certain periods, while the others can rest in crew-only areas. Airbus’s design and testing has involved alerting resting pilots when the pilot in the cockpit needs help. “It’s going to support the crews, not replace them,” says Airbus chief commercial test pilot Malcolm Ridley.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency also now requires at least two pilots in cockpits of commercial planes. It said a study couldn’t demonstrate that the Airbus system in development was currently as safe as that. “Any consideration of this will depend on the new technologies first proving their safety benefit,” said a spokeswoman for the agency.

Boeing long built aircraft with pilots at the center of their design philosophy, de-emphasizing automation. The thinking shifted after a flawed flight-control system overpowered pilots and sent two of Boeing’s 737 MAX jets into fatal nosedives in fall 2018 and again in spring 2019. The accidents also exposed Boeing’s faulty assumptions that pilots could handle such emergencies, leading the company to focus on developing more automation, improved so that it wouldn’t rely on pilots responding perfectly when things go wrong.

Boeing’s pilotless flying taxi called Wisk has been a test bed for automation. The plan is to have no pilots on board, but instead use ground controllers to oversee the electric vehicles. Boeing executives have signaled they are focused on designing the company’s commercial jetliners with two pilots in the cockpit while using Wisk’s advances in automation to reduce their workload, so they can make critical decisions faster. “These types of technologies are going to be an incredible enhancement,” Jim Webb, Boeing’s chief commercial pilot, said in September at a pilot union conference in Chicago.

Greater autonomy in aviation will become less novel over time—just as with driverless taxis, predicts Eric Allison, chief product officer at flying-taxi startup Joby. “The way these technologies are getting woven in is certainly going to make it much more mundane to interact with, effectively, robots on a regular basis—whether they are robot cars or [robots for home chores] or robot airplanes,” he said.

Reliable Robotics’ new autopilot likely at first will involve “safety pilots” behind the controls ahead of further regulatory approvals, says CEO Rose, who previously worked on autonomous technologies at SpaceX and Tesla. Ground controllers will be capable of acting as remote pilots able to intervene, but the system itself will need to be able to resolve in-flight emergencies on its own. Rose says his goal is to win Federal Aviation Administration certification for using fully remote pilots with the company’s planes in 2028.

The FAA declined to comment about Reliable’s specific work but noted the agency laid out a pathway for certifying remotely piloted and autonomous aircraft in 2020.

In addition to software, the company has been working on an onboard radar system so its autopilot can see and avoid other aircraft as pilots do. Collision-avoidance systems on commercial jets typically use a mix of transponders and other sensors, but not radar. They have also been developing stronger actuators—machines that pull and push and take the place of pilots’ muscles to move planes’ rudders and other flight-control surfaces in conditions where humans would otherwise have to intervene.

Jason Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, predicts autonomous flight won’t be ready any time soon and says he doesn’t think Reliable’s eventual system would apply to larger aircraft. “It’s a robot flying a Cessna Caravan in the desert remotely,” Ambrosi says. “It’s a lot different than an A350 or a 777 leaving out of JFK over to Europe.”

Rose said Reliable’s system will be designed to operate in busy airport environments, starting with Albuquerque, N.M.

“We’re talking about a certified system that is certified for use in and around populated areas,” he says. “We do anticipate many of the lessons learned there to transfer to other operations around the country and much of the world.”

President Trump says Washington is weighing a response

China’s new rare-earth export restrictions require permission for goods with 0.1% or more rare-earth materials sourced from China by value.

The restrictions are seen as an escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight, threatening the global semiconductor supply chain.

China produces approximately 90% of global rare earths, giving it significant leverage over key supply chains.

China’s newest restrictions on rare-earth materials would mark a nearly unprecedented export control that stands to disrupt the global economy, giving Beijing more leverage in trade negotiations and ratcheting up pressure on the Trump administration to respond.

The rule, put out Thursday by China’s Commerce Ministry, is viewed as an escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight because it threatens the supply chain for semiconductors. Chips are the lifeblood of the economy, powering phones, computers and data centers needed to train artificial-intelligence models. The rule also would affect cars, solar panels and the equipment for making chips and other products, limiting the ability of other countries to support their own industries. China produces roughly 90% of the world’s rare-earth materials.

Global companies that sell goods with certain rare-earth materials sourced from China accounting for 0.1% or more of the product’s value would need permission from Beijing, under the new rule. Tech companies will probably find it extremely difficult to show that their chips, the equipment needed to make them and other components fall below the 0.1% threshold, industry experts said.

“These rare-earth minerals and the ability to refine them are just the basis of modern civilization,” said Dean Ball, who recently left his White House role as an AI policy adviser to become a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank. He added that the rules could cause a U.S. recession if implemented aggressively because of how important AI capital spending is to the economy.

The U.S. and other countries are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers, making AI a key economic engine. China gaining control of the technology would potentially let it catch up in the AI race and upend the world order, experts said.

“It’s an economic equivalent of nuclear war—an intent to destroy the American AI industry,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank. He called it a “blackmail tactic” ahead of a potential meeting between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea in the coming weeks to continue trade talks and didn’t think China will follow through on fully implementing the rule.

Trump said at a cabinet meeting that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would figure out how to respond. “We import from China massive amounts and maybe we will have to stop doing that,” Trump said. The rules were announced without notice to the U.S., and appear to be an effort to control the world’s technology supply chains, a White House official said.

China has used rare earths to gain leverage in trade talks throughout the year. Restrictions in April sent shock waves through supply chains, helping lead to a trade truce announced in June.

Former administration officials and experts suggested the U.S. could respond by adding to its tariff regimen, cutting China off from Western semiconductor manufacturing equipment and accelerating efforts to build out domestic rare-earths capacity. Some analysts expect Trump to hit back hard.

The U.S. levies are now in the range of 30% to 50% on Chinese imports—higher than the levels negotiated with Vietnam, Japan and Indonesia. China’s average tariffs on U.S. exports are at around 33%.

While positioned as retaliation for recent U.S. export-control actions targeting Chinese tech companies, Beijing’s decision is a calculated power play, according to people familiar with the Chinese government’s decision-making process. China is trying to strengthen its leverage over Trump—whom it sees as eager to strike a deal—in a bid to extract concessions on tariffs and tech controls, the people said.

During the last round of negotiations with senior American officials in Madrid last month, China’s chief trade negotiator, Vice Premier He Lifeng, asked for the full removal of tariffs and export controls, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The latest rare-earth action, the people said, is a tactic aimed at achieving that goal.

The action, the people noted, is part of a pattern of China responding to what it perceives as feeble actions from Washington with disproportionately strong moves.

The new rules also cover goods that could be used for military purposes. They would expand on previous restrictions on rare-earth metals and related products that have already hit companies around the world.

The semiconductor supply chain is vulnerable to actions like China’s because large chip plants require big capital investments from an ecosystem of companies providing specialized equipment, intricate technical processes and final packaging. Companies in the U.S., Taiwan, Japan and the Netherlands all collaborate with one another.

The Trump and Biden administrations have offered subsidies and other policies to aid the process, but domestic capacity generally remains in its infancy.

Some analysts said the new rules will fuel new urgency for big tech companies to invest more in these areas.

“This is a real vulnerability for U.S. AI companies,” said Joseph Hoefer, chief AI officer at lobbying firm Monument Advocacy, which represents tech companies.

Safety investigations and the bully pulpit could complicate the automaker’s development of automated driving systems, but only if regulators want to

Federal regulators have opened another investigation into Tesla’s TSLA -0.72%decrease; red down pointing triangle automated driving technology, saying the system known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised) “induced” some cars to run red lights or to turn into oncoming traffic.

The probe, the latest of several to examine Tesla’s technology, covers nearly 2.9 million vehicles equipped with the FSD system. Several incidents have resulted in crashes, including some that caused injuries, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a filing published Wednesday.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Tesla and Chief Executive Elon Musk have staked out a vision to transform the electric-vehicle maker into an artificial-intelligence and robotics company, where all new Tesla models are autonomous. The newest investigation by NHTSA highlights a challenge for the regulator: It can’t keep tabs on new technology until it is already deployed on public roads.

In the past year, NHTSA has announced one investigation into how FSD responds to reduced-visibility conditions and another into a feature that lets Teslas be operated remotely—while saying it is watching the company’s introduction of a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Yet another investigation into the adequacy of Tesla’s fix for a defect in a less-capable system known as Autopilot also continues.

Little has been said about those probes. Meanwhile, Tesla continues to expand FSD’s capabilities.

NHTSA’s report cited incidents in which a car with FSD “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection.”

Auto safety experts say that NHTSA has limited ability to keep Tesla’s tech in check before things can go wrong. NHTSA can privately discuss potential defects with automakers to prompt recalls. It can also lean on the bully pulpit, issuing public statements, or launch a defect investigation, which can take months to complete and possibly lead to a recall.

The process works this way because under U.S. law, NHTSA doesn’t preapprove new car technologies, like automated driving features. Rather, companies self-certify that each vehicle and its technology meets the agency’s car safety standards.

NHTSA declined to elaborate on an ongoing defect investigation. But the agency says that once vehicles are on the road, it can investigate incidents for potential safety defects.

“Following an assessment of those reports and other relevant information, NHTSA will take any necessary actions to protect road safety,” the agency said.

If a defect exists, automakers are required to conduct a recall—and almost all happen voluntarily. That is a result of court cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s that granted NHTSA extensive authority to regulate safety defects on the road, said Matthew Wansley, professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law.

But in some cases, NHTSA decides to open an investigation if it suspects a defect exists and an automaker disagrees. These investigations can take years to complete.

The agency would typically hold a public meeting before deciding to order a recall or ask the Justice Department to sue a company to comply with a recall order. But the agency rarely flexes that power. Since 2000, NHTSA has issued only 14 recall request letters, an administrative precursor to a recall order. Those letters represent a tiny fraction of the thousands of recalls issued in that time.

Still, the agency has acted swiftly on defects before.

In the 1980s, it investigated problems associated with front-wheel drive cars made by General Motors and complaints about rear brakes locking up. The government took GM to court over the matter before NHTSA’s administrative proceedings were complete.

NHTSA ultimately lost that case, but Wansley said the agency can act expeditiously on safety defects, like the Tesla cases, if it needs to.

“NHTSA’s hand here is pretty strong if it chooses to use it,” he said.

Offshore wind industry’s development blown off course

The sector’s progress has been hindered by a combination of rising costs, project delays and a hostile US government

Once a curious novelty, the sight of wind turbines off our coasts is now a standard part of the maritime landscape, but offshore wind’s long-running growth now looks to be entering the doldrums.

Hit by the combined inflationary effects of US tariffs, higher transport expenditure and supply constraints, offshore developers are struggling with a combination of rising costs and project delays.

The situation is especially dire in the US, where the Trump administration appears bent on preventing the industry’s continued rollout.

“President Trump campaigned saying that he was going to stop offshore wind on day one, and he’s following through on that,” says Jeff Fodiak, a director at the renewable energy consultancy OWC.

In July, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management made good on that promise by temporarily halting all new approvals and permits for offshore projects. The order also resulted in the de-designation of 3.5mn acres of federal waters previously earmarked for potential wind development.

Nor are approved projects beyond regulatory disruption. In August, Danish renewable energy group Ørsted was ordered to stop work on its almost completed $1.5bn Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island because of “national security” concerns. The suspension was later lifted by a federal court but not before adding to market concerns.

Such moves come on the coattails of the withdrawal of tax breaks and other state support as the US government gradually dismantles incentives for clean energy established under Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Not helping matters was an incident last year at Vineyard Wind, the country’s first large-scale offshore wind project, where a 107-metre blade broke off and the debris washed up along the beaches of nearby Nantucket.

“Early-phase projects have not given up exactly, but they are not in a hurry to do much,” says Fodiak. “Right now, most companies are working with a skeleton team and holding out for an eventual change in the administration.”

At the same time, developers in the US and beyond are facing supply-side problems. With turbine manufacturing concentrated among a few large operators, choice can be limited and lead times long. Fierce competition for cables, electrical components and other key materials is proving a further bottleneck.

Adding to concerns are high interest rates in many markets, notes Robert Fradley, a director for offshore wind at RES, a UK-registered global renewable energy company. If government bonds are paying 5 per cent or 6 per cent, say, compared with about 10 per cent for an offshore wind project, “then you’re being asked to take on a fair bit more risk for maybe not a huge additional reward”, he reasons.

Meanwhile, old hurdles have not gone away. Notable examples include environmental concerns, local opposition and integration with existing power distribution systems.

Although the latter is arguably more complicated because of offshore wind’s location out at sea, transmission bottlenecks are a problem for all clean power projects, says Ana Musat, head of policy at the industry body RenewableUK.

“There’s just not enough grid capacity . . . it’s one of those bits of infrastructure that takes a lot to get built out,” she says.

Yet, despite this lengthy list of challenges, industry insiders are exhibiting a strong determination to look to the positive.

The fundamentals remain sound, Musat insists. Compared with other renewable sources, offshore wind has high relative capacity, is less prone to intermittency, and can be located close to coastal cities and other demand centres.

As proof, she points to the example of China. Backed by strong state support and a robust domestic supply chain, Chinese project developers have succeeded in sidestepping many of the obstacles encountered by operators elsewhere.

By the latest count, China has nearly 200 offshore wind farms at the planning, approval or construction phase. With about 41 gigawatts already connected to the grid, Asia’s largest economy already comprises more than half of the world’s offshore wind capacity.

“China is not only building a lot of renewable generation, but it’s also investing quite heavily in electrification . . . so that creates a virtuous circle,” Musat argues.

Ben Backwell, chief executive of the Global Wind Energy Council, strikes a similarly sanguine tone. While he concedes that the sector is “not growing as fast as it needs to”, he notes that offshore wind is expanding faster than its onshore equivalent.

Fuelling his assertion is a growing enthusiasm for offshore wind in countries outside the historic mainstays of China and Europe. South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia, for example, have all issued their first licences or are looking to do so shortly, he says.

“Offshore wind is very cyclical . . . but what gives me hope is that lots of new projects are still getting approved,” Backwell adds. “This technology isn’t going to be everywhere, but it’s set to be an important part of the clean energy market nonetheless.”

If operators could lock in a competitive, long-term electricity price, then its woes would instantly look less serious. To date, however, even with feed-in tariffs and other guarantees, prices in regulated markets have often been deemed too low or too short-term to make projects viable.

One exception is long-term power purchase agreements with corporations such as Google and Amazon, that are looking to green their power supply. For now, however, limited demand means premium contracts are likely to remain the exception. 

Another development that industry experts insist could turn around the sector’s fortunes is grid-level storage. Emerging battery solutions such as iron-air, sodium-ion, and green hydrogen are seen as potential answers to offshore wind’s grid integration challenges.

At present, lack of storage means offshore operators end up flooding the market with surplus electricity when winds are high, thus pushing down the price, explains Lebona Vernon, associate director for renewable energy at consultancy, Anthesis.

“With negative pricing, it’s like you can’t get paid to charge your battery, which will later be worth five or 10 times more when it’s time to discharge,” she argues.