Trump's auto safety nominee has a history of tangling with Tesla

Source: Politico

07/09/2025 12:11 PM EDT


President Donald Trump’s pick for the agency that oversees auto safety tore into Tesla seven years ago for what he called “misleading” safety claims about one of its popular electric car models.

The 2018 letter to Elon Musk from Jonathan Morrison, Trump’s nominee to lead the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, may foreshadow how he would regulate the billionaire’s electric vehicle company — at a time when Musk is estranged from the White House but still has former acolytes embedded throughout the federal bureaucracy.

Morrison was the agency’s chief counsel during Trump’s first term, when he disputed a Tesla blog post in which the company claimed that its Model 3 sedan had the “lowest probability of injury of any vehicle ever tested by NHTSA.” That statement “could be interpreted as misunderstanding safety data, an intention to mislead the public, or both,” Morrison wrote to Musk, arguing that it was inappropriate to compare the EV to other, larger vehicles.

The letter was first made public in 2019 on the legal transparency website PlainSite.org, which obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act. But Morrison’s comments have received little media attention since Trump nominated him in February.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/09/trumps-auto-safety-nominee-has-a-history-of-tangling-with-tesla-00443026