NHTSA Investigates 12th Autopilot-related Crash

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says it will investigate a 12th crash relating to Tesla Motors’ Autopilot system. The automaker has found itself under increased scrutiny as the public grows increasingly weary of technological gaps in today’s advanced driving aids. Truth be told, it’s probably shouldering more of the burden than it needs to. Whereas most driving aids manage to fly beneath the radar, Tesla’s marketing of Autopilot has always framed it as being on the cusp of true autonomy.

It’s always just one over-the-air-update away from genuine self-driving capabilities.

That’s why you don’t read reports about some poor dolt in a Toyota rear-ending someone and the government doing a deep dive on Safety Sense to figure out why. Nobody cares, and there aren’t countless examples of people taking their hands off the wheel of their Camry with confidence after being confused into thinking it could drive itself. But it happens in Tesla models with uncomfortable frequency, even among drivers who really should know better.

Initially, it only upset consumer advocacy groups (who started accusing the automaker of being intentionally deceptive with its marketing materials). Tesla was also offering one of the most useful advanced driving suites on the road. Autopilot could do more of the driving for you and, if you were creative, you could have it covering most of your highway miles for you without much interaction. The problem is that the system was never meant to handle everything and wasn’t actually autonomous; some people just started treating it as if it were.

That makes this difficult. Autopilot is a handy system that may actually be superior than an inattentive driver mindlessly trying to get through the least exciting part of their commute, yet it’s being mishandled while opening new “driving” opportunities that effectively encourage drivers to check out — an issue that affects all advanced driving systems.

Meanwhile, the NHTSA has been impressively lax in terms of applying rules. In fact, the agency openly endorses new technologies aimed at bolstering safety by handing more control over to the vehicle. Getting these products to market (theoretically hastening the arrival of self-driving cars) is the main goal. But with autonomy seeming further out and less ideal than previously presumed, the safety group has also been forced to treat every traffic incident involving these aids with an additional degree of seriousness.

Nobody wants to risk being wrong, so why not reposition the spotlight on the automaker?

From Reuters:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration special crash investigation program will investigate the Dec. 7 crash of a 2018 Tesla Model 3 on Interstate 95 in Norwalk, Connecticut, the agency confirmed.

Autopilot has been engaged in at least three fatal U.S. Tesla crashes since 2016. The agency’s special crash investigation team has inspected 12 crashes involving Tesla vehicles where it was believed Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident. To date, the agency has completed reports on two of them: a 2016 fatal crash in Florida in which Autopilot was engaged and a prior crash where Autopilot was ruled out as a factor.

Details on the latest incident are slim. Connecticut State Police claim the driver said his car, a Tesla Model 3, was in Autopilot mode while he attended to his dog in the back seat. He ended up striking the back of a police cruiser that had stopped to address a disabled vehicle in the center lane. The Model 3 driver was issued a misdemeanor summons for reckless driving and reckless endangerment. Reported injuries were not severe.

That would seem to call into question Autopilot’s ability to recognize stationary objects in the middle of the road, as well as the NHTSA’s claims that these systems are somehow a remedy for distracted driving. However, as nice as it is to have your own biases confirmed, it’s probably more important to get to the heart of the crash’s many moving parts. We’ve put the autonomous cart before the horse and for every scrap of data we can gather, the better armed we’ll be once this technology is actually ready.

In the interim, we have to decide whether semi-autonomous systems (which aren’t autonomous at all) are a help or hindrance. As usual, balance is probably the answer. It’s just a difficult concept to embrace when regulators are playing a zero sum safety game and automakers just want to look as though they have the most cutting-edge vehicles on the market.

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