US opens probe in Tesla crash that killed motorcyclist

Tesla's autopilot feature is under investigation after a fatal crash in California. File picture: Beck Diefenbach / Reuters

Tesla's autopilot feature is under investigation after a fatal crash in California. File picture: Beck Diefenbach / Reuters

Published Jul 19, 2022

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San Francisco – The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a probe into the Tesla crash that killed a motorcyclist in California earlier this month.

The latest probe aims to find whether the Autopilot advanced driver assistance system in a 2021 Tesla Model Y was in use at the time of the fatal crash, TechCrunch reported late on Monday.

Earlier this month, the US agency opened a probe into another crash in which a pedestrian was killed and which involved a 2018 Tesla Model 3 in California.

The NHTSA is also probing a Tesla crash in Florida in which a 66-year-old Tesla driver and a 67-year-old passenger were killed.

In May, the agency started investigating a crash involving a 2022 Tesla Model S that killed three people.

The latest probe is the 38th one of a crash involving a Tesla vehicle since 2016. Of those crashes, 18 were fatal.

Elon Musk-owned Tesla's advanced driver assistance system, known as Autopilot, has increasingly come under scrutiny by the federal agency.

Last month, the NHTSA “upgraded” its investigation into Tesla's Autopilot after discovering new incidents of the EVs crashing into parked first-responder vehicles.

The agency said in a notice that it was expanding its preliminary evaluation of Tesla Autopilot systems to an engineering analysis.

A recent report said that the NHTSA has linked 392 crashes to self-driving and driver assistance systems in 10 months and about 70% those were Tesla vehicles.

The report mentioned that out of 392 crashes, 273 were Tesla vehicles using Autopilot or the Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta.

The NHTSA's special crash investigations (SCI) programme focuses on cases that are useful for examining special crash circumstances or outcomes from an engineering perspective.

IANS