The car insurance service opened a preliminary assessment in August to assess the system’s performance on 765,000 vehicles after about a dozen accidents in which Tesla vehicles hit stalled emergency vehicles – and said Thursday it had identified six additional crashes. NHTSA is upgrading its research to mechanical analysis, which it must do before requesting a recall if deemed necessary. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register The car safety regulator examines whether Tesla vehicles adequately ensure that drivers pay attention. The agency added that drivers in most of the accidents under investigation had complied with Tesla’s alarm strategy, which seeks to attract the driver’s attention by raising questions about its effectiveness. In 2020, the National Transportation Safety Board criticized Tesla’s “ineffective monitoring of driver involvement” following a fatal autopilot accident in 2018 and said NHTSA had provided “insufficient oversight”. The NHTSA said the upgrade is “to extend existing collision analysis, evaluate additional data sets, conduct vehicle evaluations and investigate the extent to which autopilot and related Tesla systems can aggravate human behavior or safety hazards.” undermining the effectiveness of driver supervision. “ Tesla, which disbanded its press office, did not respond to a request for comment. NHTSA said it had reports of 16 accidents, including seven injuries and one death, involving Tesla autopilot vehicles that struck fixed first-line vehicles and road maintenance. Democratic Sen. Ed Markey praised the NHTSA upgrade. “Every day Tesla ignores safety rules and misleads the public about the autopilot system, our roads become more dangerous,” he wrote on Twitter. The NHTSA said its analysis showed that the Frontal Impact Warnings were activated in most cases just before the impact and that the subsequent Automatic Emergency Braking intervened in about half of all accidents. “On average in these accidents, Autopilot stopped checking the vehicle less than a second before the first collision,” the service added. The NHTSA noted that “where a video of an incident was available, the approach to the scene of the first responder would be visible to the driver for an average of 8 seconds before the collision”. The agency also examined 106 reported autopilot accidents and said that in about half, “there were indications that the driver was not adequately responding to the needs of dynamic driving.” “The use or misuse of vehicle components by a driver or the inadvertent operation of a vehicle does not necessarily rule out a system defect,” the service said. NHTSA also found in about a quarter of the 106 accidents, the main cause of the collision appeared to be related to the operation of the system where Tesla says there may be restrictions on places such as roads other than restricted highways or visibility environments that include factors such as rain, snow or ice. Tesla says that Autopilot allows vehicles to brake and steer automatically within their lanes, but does not allow them to drive on their own. An NHTSA spokesman said that advanced driving assistance functions can promote safety “by helping drivers avoid accidents and mitigating the severity of accidents that occur, but as with all technologies and equipment in motor vehicles, drivers must to use them correctly and responsibly “. Last week, the NHTSA said it had asked Tesla to answer questions by June 20, after receiving 758 reports of unexpected Autopilot-related braking activation in a separate survey of 416,000 newer vehicles. Separately, NHTSA has opened 35 special accident investigations into cases involving Tesla vehicles suspected of using Autopilot or other advanced systems involving 14 reported deaths since 2016, including one accident that killed three last month in Calif. NHTSA has asked twelve other automakers, including General Motors (GM.N) Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) and Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) to answer questions about “driver loyalty and attention strategies” using assist systems during the Tesla investigation, but did not disclose their answers. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by David Shepardson. Editing by Bill Berkrot, Bernadette Baum and Chizu Nomiyama Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
