NHTSA Investigation Into Telsa Autopilot Intensifies
Booga1 writes:
According to Car and Driver: 830,000 Teslas with Autopilot under NHTSA Investigation, Recall Possible
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will take a deeper look into how Tesla vehicles equipped with so-called Autopilot driver assistance software navigate when interacting with first responder vehicles at the scene of a collision. NHTSA said this week that it is upgrading the Preliminary Evaluation it started last August into an Engineering Analysis, which is the next step in a possible recall of hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles.
NHTSA said in its notice that it was motivated to upgrade the status of the investigation because of "an accumulation of crashes in which Tesla vehicles, operating with Autopilot engaged, struck stationary in-road or roadside first responder vehicles tending to pre-existing collision scenes."
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In a public update on its probe, NHTSA laid out its case for why Autopilot needs to be investigated. NHTSA said it has so far investigated 16 crashes and found that Autopilot only aborted its own vehicle control, on average, "less than one second prior to the first impact" even though video of these events proved that the driver should have been made aware of a potential incident an average of eight seconds before impact. NHTSA found most of the drivers had their hands on the wheel (as Autopilot requires) but that the vehicles did not alert drivers to take evasive action in time.
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