US to probe Tesla's Autopilot after series of crashes

WASHINGTON • US auto safety regulators have opened a formal safety probe into Tesla's driver assistance system Autopilot after a series of crashes involving Tesla models and emergency vehicles.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Monday said it had identified 11 crashes since January 2018 in which Teslas "have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles involved with those scenes".

The probe will take in 765,000 US vehicles with Autopilot built since 2014. The agency could then 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 carmakers.

NHTSA said it had reports of 17 injuries and one death in the 11 crashes, including the December 2019 crash of a Tesla Model 3 that left a passenger dead after the vehicle collided with a parked fire truck in Indiana.

The crashes involved vehicles "all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control", it said.

Before NHTSA could demand a recall, it must first upgrade an investigation into an engineering analysis. The agency said most of the 11 crashes took place after dark and crash scenes included measures like emergency vehicle lights, flares or road cones.

Autopilot was on in at least three fatal Tesla US crashes since 2016, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has said. It criticised Tesla's lack of system safeguards for Autopilot and NHTSA's failure to ensure the safety of Autopilot.

NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy on Monday praised the new probe, saying the board has urged the agency to develop standards for drive monitoring systems and require automakers to "incorporate system safeguards that limit the use of automated vehicle control systems to those conditions for which they were designed".

In February last year, Tesla's director of autonomous driving technology, Mr Andrej Karpathy, identified a challenge for its Autopilot system: how to recognise when a parked police car's emergency flashing lights are turned on.

University of South Carolina law professor Bryant Walker Smith said the parked emergency crashes "illustrate in vivid and even tragic fashion some of the key concerns with Tesla's system".

Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Ed Markey urged a thorough and transparent probe that would lead to improvements in the safety of Tesla's automated driving and driver assistance technology and prevent future crashes.

NHTSA said it has 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 Autopilot in three of the crashes. It noted that "no commercially available motor vehicles today are capable of driving themselves".

Separately, six children and an adult were taken to hospital with injuries after a car crashed in a school carpark in southern England on Monday evening, the Telegraph reported. At least one person was reported to have been pinned under the Tesla Model 3.

BLOOMBERG, REUTERS