US agencies investigate electric car crash
DETROIT: Two federal agencies have dispatched teams to investigate the California crash of a Tesla Model S electric car that may have been operating under its semiautonomous Autopilot system.
It is the second time the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have investigated the performance of Autopilot, which keeps a vehicle centred in its lane at a set distance from cars in front of it, and can change lanes and brake automatically.
The safety board sent two investigators to Culver City on Tuesday, said spokesman Peter Knudson, while NHTSA confirmed on Wednesday that it was also dispatching a special team “to investigate the crash and assess lessons learned”.
Neither agency would comment further, but it was likely that they would seek information about whether Autopilot was on and if its sensors failed to see a stopped fire truck on Monday on Interstate 405 in Culver City near Los Angeles.
The NTSB said on Twitter that investigators would focus on driver
and vehicle factors.
The Tesla driver told the California Highway Patrol that he had activated Autopilot before the crash, but the highway patrol said in a news release that it could not verify
the driver’s statement at this time.
The crash remained under investigation, the highway patrol said.
The NTSB in September determined that design limitations of the Tesla Model S Autopilot played a major role in a May 2016 fatal crash in Florida involving a vehicle operating under Autopilot.
But it blamed the crash on an inattentive Tesla driver’s overreliance on technology and a truck driver who made a left turn in front of the car.
The California probe comes as Congress and federal agencies grapple with how to regulate autonomous vehicles and those with systems that are partially self-driving.
The systems can significantly reduce crashes, but computer-driven vehicles can also make mistakes.
Tesla would not say if Autopilot was working at the time of the Culver City crash, but said in a statement on Monday that drivers must stay attentive when it is in use.
In Monday’s crash, the highway patrol said the southbound Tesla hit the rear of the Culver City firetruck, which was parked at an angle in the carpool lane, while firefighters tended to a crash on the opposite side of the freeway.
The truck was unoccupied at the time and no injuries were claimed by anyone at the crash scene, the news release said.