A car accident

Tesla’s experiments with cars under watch

Just about 11 weeks ago, an accident that the entire automobile industry feared, occurred. At 3.45 p.m. on a Florida highway on May 7, a Tesla Model S running in the self-driving Autopilot mode was involved in an accident that led to the death of its driver, Joshua Brown. The exact causes of this incident are being examined and the technology is under review. This is an important test case for insurance and liability. But more importantly, the reverberations of the accident continue to be felt in the automobile industry in different ways. Selfdriving vehicles may already be safer than most human drivers. Over 70,000 cars with Tesla’s Autopilot technology are currently operational. Tesla recorded over 208 million kilometres of driving on Autopilot before this first fatal accident. Globally, a fatal auto accident occurs every 96 million kilometres on average, with over 1.3 million persons killed every year. So Tesla is doing well statistically. The Model S is also certified as the world’s safest car in crash tests conducted by the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

What happened in Florida requires closer study. An 18-wheel truck trailer had turned