Rule changes announced by the Trump administration this week could allow automakers to report fewer crashes involving self-driving cars, with Tesla potentially emerging as the main beneficiary. The Transportation Department announced Thursday that it will no longer require automakers to report certain kinds of non-fatal crashes — but the exception will apply only to partial self-driving vehicles using so-called Level 2 systems, the kind Tesla deploys. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had complained the old reporting rules cast his company in a bad light. If Tesla and other automakers are required to report fewer crashes into a national database, that could make it more difficult for regulators to catch equipment defects and for the public to access information about a company’s overall safety, auto industry analysts say. It will also allow Tesla to trumpet a cleaner record to sell more cars. “This will significantly reduce the number of crashes reported by Tesla,” said auto analyst Sam Abuelsamid at Telemetry Insight. Added Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, noting that Tesla rival Waymo won’t get an exception, “This is a win for Tesla, a loss for Waymo.” Tesla stock soared nearly 10% Friday on the rule changes. Wall Street analysts, and Musk critics, have said that Musk’s role as an adviser to President Donald Trump could put Tesla in position to benefit from any changes to regulations involving self-driving cars. Other car makers such as Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru and BMW make vehicles with Level 2 systems that help keep cars in lanes, change speed or brake automatically, but Tesla accounts for the vast majority on the road. Vehicles used by Waymo and others with systems that completely take over for the driver, called Automated Driving Systems, will not benefit from the change. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which enforces vehicle safety standards, said the new rules don’t favor one type of self-driving system over another, and that raft of changes it announced will help all self-driving automakers. “No ADS company is hurt by these changes,” the agency said in statement to The Associated Press, using the acronym for Automatic Driving System. It added that the changes also make sense because “with ADS, no driver is present meaning stronger safety protocols are needed.” Waymo declined to comment for this story. The AP reached out to Tesla but did not receive a reply. Under the change, any Level 2 crash that is so bad it needs a tow truck to come will no longer be required to be reported if it doesn’t result in death or injury or air-bag deployment. But if a tow truck is called for crashes of vehicles using ADS, it has to be reported. The vast majority of partial self-driving vehicle crashes reported under the old NHTSA rules involved Teslas — more than 800 of a total 1,040 crashes in the past 12 months, according to an AP review of the data. It’s unclear how many of those Tesla crashes required the vehicles to be towed, because a column requesting that information in the database is mostly blank. The NHTSA said after the story was published that only 8% of total reported crashes under the old criteria were cases in which partial self-driving vehicles had to be towed away and there was no other qualifying crash-reporting factor involved. It is […]