Tesla under investigation 🚘

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Tesla under investigation 🚘

Tonight: Tesla's Autopilot is under federal investigation; an extremely rare baseball card fetches a record price; and there's a special birthday in the house. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

🚗 CAR TALK

Our self-driving future feels farther away than ever. Like, I'm pretty sure that as a kid I was promised by TV and movies that by 2021 we all be dashing around the world Jetsons-style, but so far we can't even get a reliable self-driving car on the road.

The news: Tesla shares dropped 5% Monday morning after news emerged that federal officials are investigating at least 11 accidents involving Teslas using Autopilot or other self-driving features that crashed into parked emergency vehicles.

Key points:

Seven of these accidents resulted 17 injuries and one death, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.
The safety of Tesla's Autopilot feature has been questioned before. It was found to be partly to blame in a 2018 crash that killed the driver. And police in a Houston suburb said there was no one in the driver's seat of a Tesla that crashed and killed two people in the car earlier this year, a charge that Tesla has denied.
What Tesla says: Cars using Autopilot, according to the company's data, have fewer accidents per mile than cars being driven by drivers. But Tesla does warn that "current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous."
What critics say: Hey, Elon, we didn't sign up for this. The investigation by the NHTSA is "zeroing in on a particular danger that Tesla creates for people outside the vehicle — ie, those who never agreed to be Autopilot 'guinea pigs,'" wrote analyst Gordon Johnson in a note to clients Monday. "Thus, to simply say 'Tesla drivers accept Autopilot's risks,' as has been used in the past, does not appear to be a defense here."

CNN Business' Chris Isidore has more.

RELATED: While we're dreaming of our flying-car future, it's worth mentioning Audi's latest concept car, the Skysphere, which sounds like it should fly. But it doesn't. Anyway, Audi says it will be able to drive itself (naturally). But the real hook is that it's basically two cars in one.

⚾ NUMBER OF THE DAY

$6.6 million

A rare baseball card depicting Pittsburgh Pirates legend Honus Wagner sold for $6.6 million on Monday. That blew away the previous record – a 1952 Mickey Mantle card, which sold earlier this year for $5.2 million.

🏡 STAYING HOME

Wall Street's attitude toward returning to the office has been, more or less, get vaccinated and get your butt back in your chair, or else.

But State Street, one of the world's largest asset managers (also the folks behind the "Fearless Girl" statue outside the NYSE), is going the opposite direction. The firm is shutting down its two Manhattan offices completely, and adding shared workspaces in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Why it matters: New York's commercial real estate market is under immense pressure. Why endure the city's high taxes and absurd rent when your workers have been doing just fine at home? A lot of firms are questioning that right now, and the ripple effects could be huge.

In State Street's case, that's about 500 fewer workers heading into Midtown every day. That means 500 workers who are not buying coffee and pastries for team meetings, 500 workers not taking a lunch break and paying way too much for a chopped salad, 500 workers not being tempted to go out for happy hour for "just one drink" (in the New York dialect, that means four drinks, a 10pm falafel and a $40 Uber ride).

As Kathryn Wylde, chief executive of the business group Partnership for New York City, told the Wall Street Journal: "It's certainly a wake-up call that we cannot take for granted New York's position as the financial capital…People have learned they can work profitably from anywhere—and that's a competitive threat to the concentration of talent in New York."

🚆 QUOTE OF THE DAY

This is an improve-the-status-quo bill. Passengers won't have to bring Velcro and duct tape to repair their own train cars.

— Jim Mathews, CEO of the Rail Passengers Association, on the US infrastructure bill

Don't expect any 200 mph trains, or even cheaper fares, as a result of the bipartisan infrastructure bill in Congress. Most of the new funding will go toward maintenance, rather than the futuristic high-speed trains that riders in Europe and Asia have enjoyed for decades. That's because even the $66 billion in the Senate bill won't be enough to undo previous administrations' efforts to slash Amtrak's funding while pouring money into road and air travel.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

✈️ International airlines scrambled to reroute flights away from Afghan airspace as the country fell to the Taliban.

📱 T-Mobile was hit by a data breach but it declined to say whether any personal information from customers was accessed or how widespread the damage may be.

🚀 Blue Origin filed a federal lawsuit to challenge a NASA moon landing contract awarded solely to rival SpaceX.

🏖️ Hyatt has agreed to buy luxury resorts operator Apple Leisure Group from private equity firms for $2.7 billion — a big bet that pent-up demand will boost the market for upscale leisure travel.