US opens Tesla probe after more crashes involving its so-called full self-driving technology
Federal auto safety regulators have opened a new investigation into Tesla’s so-called fully autonomous driving technology after dozens of incidents in which the electric vehicle maker’s cars ran red lights or drove on the wrong side of the road, sometimes…
WASHINGTON– WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal auto safety regulators have opened a new investigation into Tesla’s so-called fully autonomous driving technology after dozens of incidents in which its vehicles ran red lights or drove on the wrong side of the road, sometimes crashing into other vehicles and injuring people.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a filing dated Tuesday that it has 58 reports of incidents involving Tesla vehicles violating highway safety laws while operating in fully autonomous driving mode. In reports to regulators, many Tesla drivers said the cars gave them no warning about this unexpected behavior.
The survey covers 2,882,566 vehicles, essentially all Teslas equipped with fully autonomous driving technology, or FSD, of which there are two types. Level 2 driver assistance software, or “Fully Autonomous (Supervised) Driving,” requires drivers to pay full attention to the road. The company is still testing a version that doesn’t require driver intervention, something the automaker’s owner and CEO Elon Musk has been promising to roll out for years.
The new investigation follows a host of other investigations into the FSD feature on Teslas, which has been blamed for several injuries and deaths. Tesla has repeatedly said that the system cannot drive itself and that human drivers must be ready to intervene at any time.
Tesla is also under investigation by the NHTSA for “summoning” technology that allows drivers to tell their car to go to their location to pick them up, a feature that has reportedly led to some parking lot skirmishes. An investigation into the driver-assistance features of 2.4 million Teslas was launched last year after several crashes in fog and other low visibility conditions, including one in which a pedestrian was killed.
Another investigation was launched by NHTSA in August to determine why Tesla apparently failed to promptly report accidents to the agency, as its rules require.
Musk is under pressure to show that the latest advances in his driver-assistance features have not only solved such problems, but made them so good that good drivers no longer even need to look out the window. He recently promised to put hundreds of thousands of self-driving Tesla cars and Tesla robo-taxis on the roads by the end of next year.
Tesla shares fell 1.4% on Thursday.
