Investigations into Tesla cars are set to go deeper and could lead to a recall after more than a dozen of the vehicles crashed while on Autopilot.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), an agency of the US federal government, began carrying out a probe in August last year into the electric vehicle company co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk. But the agency has now upgraded their investigation to an "engineering analysis", after which they will determine whether there should be a recall, The Guardian reports .
The investigation focuses on Tesla’s Autopilot feature which enables cars to steer, accelerate and brake automatically with the help of artificial intelligence. While the features aim to give drivers less work to do at the wheel, the Tesla website insists that they “are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment”.
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16 Tesla vehicles were found to have crashed between January 2018 and January 2022, resulting in 15 injuries and one death. The NHTSA said forensic data had indicated that the drivers had their hands on the steering wheel as advised when the majority of these accidents took place, in which the cars had struck stationary emergency and road maintenance vehicles.
The investigation is covering all four Tesla models, Y, X, S and 3 - more than 800,000 of the cars have been sold in the US. The agency said they are looking into how the Tesla systems “may exacerbate human factors or behavioural safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver’s supervision”.
The NHTSA said that in around half of the reported Autopilot crash cases they had reviewed, there was an indication that “the driver was insufficiently responsive to the needs of the dynamic driving task”, Reuters reports . The agency also shared that their analysis found Tesla’s Automatic Emergency Braking feature only intervened in approximately half of the crashes.
This isn’t the only ongoing investigation into Tesla - the NHTSA is also looking into complaints about the vehicles braking suddenly, also called “phantom braking”, when driving at high speed. Although the agency has received more than 750 complaints about the issue, there have been no related crashes reported.
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