The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a formal safety probe Monday into Tesla’s driver assistance system, Autopilot, after identifying 11 crashes involving Tesla cars and first responder scenes since 2018. The NHTSA reported 17 injuries and one death resulting from the crashes. A 2017 NHTSA investigation into Autopilot concluded without any action, but this investigation will take in 765,000 U.S. vehicles with Autopilot and inspect technologies “used to monitor, assist, and enforce the driver’s engagement.” All vehicles involved had the Autopilot feature or the traffic-aware cruise control engaged when they crashed. Detecting the presence of emergency vehicles is an ongoing issue, as Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of autonomous driving technology, said the Autopilot struggles to recognize a police car’s emergency flashing lights and CEO Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla Vision, another driver assistance system, will have the ability to detect vehicle lights like turn signals and emergency vehicle lights added soon. Results of the two-step inquiry are likely to take a year or more.
