The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Thursday it is upgrading its investigation into 830,000 Tesla vehicles with its advanced driver assistance system Autopilot before it can take a necessary step.
In August the auto safety agency opened a preliminary assessment to assess the system’s performance in 765,000 vehicles after nearly a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles stopped emergency vehicles — and said Thursday it had identified six additional crashes. Was.
NHTSA is upgrading its investigation to an engineering analysis it should do before seeking a recall if deemed necessary.
The auto safety regulator is reviewing whether Tesla vehicles adequately ensure drivers are paying attention. The agency added evidence that drivers in most of the crashes under review had complied with Tesla’s cautionary tactic that forces attention away from the driver, raising questions about its effectiveness.
In 2020, the National Transportation Safety Board criticized Tesla’s “ineffective monitoring of driver engagement” after the 2018 fatal Autopilot crash, saying NHTSA had provided “understood oversight”.
NHTSA said the upgrade is “to expand existing crash analysis, to evaluate additional data sets, to conduct vehicle evaluations, and to detect the degree to which Autopilot and related Tesla systems reduce driver effectiveness due to human factors or behavioral safety.” can increase the risks.”
Tesla, which has dissolved its press offices, did not respond to a request for comment.
NHTSA said it had reports of 16 accidents, including seven injury incidents and one death, involving Tesla vehicles on Autopilot that struck stationary first-responders and road maintenance vehicles.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey praised NHTSA’s upgrade. “Every day when Tesla disregards safety regulations and misleads the public about its ‘autopilot’ system, our roads get more dangerous,” he wrote on Twitter.
NHTSA said its analysis indicated that Forward Collision warnings were activated in most incidents just before impact and that automatic emergency braking afterward intervened in about half of the accidents.
“In these accidents, on average, the autopilot stopped vehicle control less than a second before first impact,” the agency said.
NHTSA noted that “where incident video was available, the approach to the first reaction scene would have been visible to the driver for an average of 8 seconds of impact.”
The agency also reviewed 106 reported autopilot accidents and said in nearly half, “indications were present that the driver was insufficiently responsive to the needs of the dynamic driving task.”
“The use or misuse of vehicle parts by the driver, or unintentional operation of the vehicle does not necessarily lead to a system malfunction,” the agency said.
In nearly a quarter of the 106 crashes NHTSA found, the primary accident factor appears to be related to the operation of the system where Tesla says limits may exist in places such as roadways other than highways with limited access, or the visibility of rain in environments. such factors may be involved. , ice, or snow.
Tesla says Autopilot allows vehicles to brake in their lanes and steer automatically, but it doesn’t enable them to do the driving themselves.
An NHTSA spokesperson said that advanced driving assistance features “can promote safety by helping drivers avoid accidents and reduce the severity of accidents, but as with all technologies and tools on motor vehicles, drivers need to know their correct and Must be used responsibly.”
Last week, NHTSA said it asked Tesla to answer questions by June 20 after receiving 758 reports of unexpected brake activation involving Autopilot in a separate investigation of 416,000 new vehicles.
Separately, the NHTSA has opened 35 special crash investigations into incidents involving Tesla vehicles that suspected the use of Autopilot or other advanced systems, including reports of 14 deaths from 2016, including three in California last month. Went.
NHTSA asked a dozen other automakers, including General Motors, Toyota Motor Corp and Volkswagen, to answer questions on “driver engagement and attentiveness strategies using driver assistance systems” during its Tesla investigation, but did not release their response. Is.
0 notes
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
for the latest auto news And reviewFollow carandbike.com Twitter, Facebookand subscribe to us youtube Channel.