Yes, except for the sort of “FAA Certification” that let Boeing sign off on their own work and the FAA just rubber stamp it...

I’d kinda like to see Tesla’s reaction if they were told that any “autopilot” crashes could result in the entire fleet of that model car being taken off the road, with Tesla responsible to all the owners for the disruption while a thorough investigation takes place, possibly a year or more.

Without any real insight, my hunch is the FAA did that because they are probably too strapped/underfunded to do the proper due diligence. It’s tough to know enough about multiple complex airframes enough to ferret our interaction failures so they defer to the teams that supposedly do know enough... which creates an inherent conflict of interest.

It will be interesting to see how regulators treat autonomous vehicles. I have a feeling they will defer to the existing recall mechanism rather than completely grounding a fleet