The system was found to give drivers a false sense of security, according to US safety regulators.
Tesla’s Autopilot, an advanced driver-assistance feature that Elon Musk says will eventually lead to fully autonomous cars, has been linked to hundreds of crashes and more than a dozen deaths in the latest report from American auto safety regulators, released Thursday.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said its investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot has identified at least 14 fatal crashes in which the feature was involved.
During its three-year investigation, which began in 2021, the agency examined nearly 1,000 reported accidents that occurred between 2018 and August 2023. It found that misuse of the autopilot system caused at least 14 accidents which caused deaths and injuries. “many others involving serious injuries.”
NHTSA’s Office of Defective Investigations (ODI) found evidence that Tesla “The weak driver engagement system was not suitable for the permissive operational capabilities of the Autopilot,” which gave rise to a “critical safety gap”.
Of the 956 crashes examined, officials revealed autopilot-related trends in about half of them.
Of the remaining 467, the ODI identified 211 accidents in which “The front plane of the Tesla hit a vehicle or obstacle in its path.” These accidents, often the most serious, left 14 dead and 49 injured. More than a hundred incidents also involved leaving the road where Autosteer, a component of Autopilot, was “inadvertently disengaged by the driver’s actions”, the report said.
Investigators concluded that drivers using Autopilot, or the system’s more advanced fully autonomous driving feature, “were not sufficiently engaged in the driving task.” Tesla’s technology “failed to adequately ensure that drivers maintained their attention on the driving task” NHTSA said.
The investigation also revealed that the electric car maker’s claims did not correspond to reality.
NHTSA raised concerns that Tesla’s Autopilot name “Can lead drivers to believe that automation has greater capabilities than it does and invite them to place too much trust in automation.”
American safety authorities announced Friday that they had opened another investigation into Tesla’s largest recall ever carried out in December, covering more than 2 million American vehicles, almost all of its vehicles on American roads.
The recall was ordered by NHTSA following Tesla’s software update, designed to limit the use of its Autopilot feature. The company plans to unveil its robotaxi on August 8.
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RT