I agree with this. I wonder if they require their suppliers to be ISO 9001 certified. It's incredibly common in the legacy auto manufacturers. The fact that it wasn't mentioned by Tesla in any of their rebuttals makes me wonder if they deviated from this best practice. If so, they seem to be forcing themselves to relearn the same mistakes of their predecessors.

This certification area is one I've given some thought to. I think, especially in the AV space, there is a need for an improved standardized certification process. But to be fair, the VW diesel scandal followed a standardized EPA test, and they still gamed it, so it has to be carefully thought out.

That is why I think it should be some form of sampling. Where the agency assessing can pick a random vehicle from the factory and test it. It would make gamifying a lot more difficult

Sampling wouldn't have helped in the VW emissions case. All the cars had the same software to detect if it was on the road or at a test stand and adjust the fuel mapping accordingly. Maybe in the future, they'll do road tests. IMO, any time you can test it in a higher fidelity environment, the better. There's a lot that needs to be worked out on the testing side to prevent gaming the system.