US investigates Tesla Autopilot over crashes involving emergency services

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has launched an investigation into the operation of Tesla’s Autopilot software. The agency does this because of multiple crashes of Tesla cars with stationary emergency vehicles.

It NHTSA investigation focuses on the Tesla Model Y, X and S, which were released between 2014 and 2021. According to the authority, this concerns a total of about 765,000 cars. The research focuses on determining what technology and methods Tesla uses to force drivers to pay attention to their surroundings while driver assistance is on.

The agency will also investigate how the object detection works exactly and how the cars react to it. It is the first time that an investigation into the general operation of Autopilot has been carried out. Earlier, research was done on specific cases.

The investigation is being triggered because 11 incidents have been reported to the authority since January 2018 in which a Tesla collided with a stationary emergency vehicle using Autopilot features such as Traffic-Aware Cruise Control. According to NHTSA, those accidents often took place at night and emergency services used indicators such as flashing lights, flashing warning signs and traffic cones.

According to the law, if drivers have activated driver assistance, they are responsible for spotting danger on the road and anticipating it. According to experts, recognizing stationary vehicles is a common problem for driver assistance systems in cars. Wired wrote about that in 2018. Many stationary objects are ignored, because otherwise the systems would react to all kinds of static objects along the way.

Tesla Model S