WASHINGTON — US auto safety regulators
said Monday they had opened a formal safety probe into Tesla’s driver
assistance system Autopilot after a series of crashes involving emergency
vehicles.
اضافة اعلان
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) said that since January 2018 it had identified 11 crashes in which
Tesla models "have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently
struck one or more vehicles involved with those scenes."
After investigating, NHTSA could opt to take no
action, or it could demand a recall, which might effectively impose limits on
how, when, and where Autopilot operates.
Any restrictions could narrow the
competitive gap between Tesla’s system and similar advanced driver assistance
systems offered by established automakers.
The auto safety agency said it had reports of 17
injuries and one death in those crashes.
Tesla shares were down 3.6 percent on the
investigation.
The company did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.
Chief Executive
Elon Musk has repeatedly defended Autopilot and in
April tweeted that "Tesla with Autopilot engaged now approaching 10 times
lower chance of accident than average vehicle."
NHTSA said the 11 crashes included four this year,
most recently one last month in San Diego, and it had opened a preliminary
evaluation of Autopilot in 2014-2021 Tesla Models Y, X, S, and 3.
"The involved subject vehicles were all
confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise
Control during the approach to the crashes," NHTSA said in a document
opening the investigation.
The probe covers an estimated 765,000 Tesla vehicles
in the United States, NHTSA said in opening the investigation.
After dark
NHTSA has in recent years sent numerous special
crash investigation teams to review a series of Tesla crashes.
It said most of the 11 crashes took place after dark
and the crash scenes encountered included measures like emergency vehicle
lights, flares, or road cones.
NHTSA said its investigation "will assess the
technologies and methods used to monitor, assist, and enforce the driver's
engagement with the dynamic driving task during Autopilot operation."
Before NHTSA could demand a recall, it must first
decide to upgrade a preliminary investigation into an engineering analysis.
The
two-step investigative process often takes a year or more.
Autopilot, which handles some driving tasks and
allows drivers to keep their hands off the wheel for extended periods, was operating
in at least three Tesla vehicles involved in fatal US crashes since 2016, the
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has said.
The NTSB has criticized Tesla's lack of system
safeguards for Autopilot and NHTSA's failure to ensure the safety of Autopilot.
In February 2020, Tesla's director of autonomous
driving technology, Andrej Karpathy, identified a challenge for its Autopilot
system: how to recognize when a parked police car's emergency flashing lights
are turned on.
"This is an example of a new task we would like
to know about," Karpathy said at a conference.
In one of the cases, a doctor was watching a movie
on a phone when his vehicle rammed into a state trooper in North Carolina.
Key concerns
Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University
of South Carolina, said the parked emergency crashes "really seems to
illustrate in vivid and even tragic fashion some of the key concerns with
Tesla's system.”
He said it induces driver complacency and is not working in
some non-typical circumstances.
NHTSA, he suggested, "has been far too
deferential and timid, particularly with respect to Tesla."
One of the 11 crashes NHTSA cited was a January 2018
crash into a parked fire truck in California.
NTSB said the system’s design
“permitted the driver to disengage from the driving task," in the Culver
City, California, crash.
NHTSA said Monday it had sent teams to review 31
Tesla crashes involving 10 deaths since 2016 where it suspected advanced driver
assistance systems were in use.
It ruled out the systems in three of the
crashes.
In a statement, NHTSA reminded drivers "no
commercially available motor vehicles today are capable of driving themselves.
... Certain advanced driving assistance features can promote safety by helping
drivers avoid crashes and mitigate the severity of crashes that occur, but as
with all technologies and equipment on motor vehicles, drivers must use them
correctly and responsibly."
Tesla and CEO Musk have sparred with US agencies
over the years on various safety issues.
In February, Tesla agreed to recall 134,951 Model S
and Model X vehicles with touchscreen displays that could fail and raise the
risk of a crash after US auto safety regulators sought the recall.
NHTSA made a rare formal recall request to Tesla in
January and said other automakers issued numerous recalls for similar safety
issues stemming from the touchscreen failure.
Musk said last month on Twitter the automaker will
hold "Tesla AI Day" on Thursday to "go over progress with Tesla
AI software & hardware, both training & inference. Purpose is
recruiting.”
In January 2017, NHTSA closed a preliminary
evaluation into Autopilot covering 43,000 vehicles without taking any action
after a nearly seven-month investigation.
NHTSA said at the time it "did not identify any
defects in the design or performance" of Autopilot, "nor any
incidents in which the systems did not perform as designed."
NHTSA has not had a Senate-confirmed administrator
since January 2017 and nearly seven months into office President Joe Biden has
not nominated anyone for the post.
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