Tesla driver didn’t have hands on wheel at time of fatal crash, NTSB report says
The probe into a March crash of a Tesla Model X in Mountain View that killed the vehicle’s driver took another turn Thursday as federal investigators said the car was speeding and the driver didn’t have his hands on the car’s steering wheel during the last seconds leading up to the collision.
The National Transportation Safety Board issued its preliminary report on theMarch 23 accident in which the driver, Walter Huang, of Foster City, died after his 2017 Tesla Model X P100Dslammed into a safety barrier at the Highway 85 interchange after traveling south on Highway 101.
The report said the carwasmoving at about 71 miles per hour in a 65 mph zone when the crash occurred, and the “traffic-aware cruise control” was set at 75 mph. The NTSB said Huang’s vehicle sped up from 62 mph to 70.8 mph in the last three seconds prior to the crash.
The NTSB said information downloaded from the car showed Huang turned on the Tesla’s Autopilot function four times during the 32-minute-long drive, and Autopilot was on for nearly all of the final 19minutes of the drive up until the car crashed.
The role of Autopilot is considered to be one of the central factors in the accident. Autopilot is a feature that allows a Tesla to performsome self-driving functions such as lane identification and lane changing. The NTSB report said that during the drive, Huang’s vehicle “provided two visual alerts and one auditory alert for the driver to place his hands on the steeringwheel. These alertswere made more than 15minutes prior to the crash.”
The report went on to say that just one minute before the crash occurred, “the driver’s hands were detected on the steeringwheel on three separate occasions, for a total of 34 seconds; for the last 6 seconds prior to the crash, the vehicle did not detect the driver’s hands on the steering wheel.”
A Tesla spokesperson declined to comment on the NTSB report, and referred to aMarch 28 company blog post on thematter in which Tesla said, “Autopilot does not prevent all accidents — such a standard would be impossible — but it makes themmuch less likely to occur.”
The NTSB said it’s workingwiththeCaliforniaHighway Patrol and the state Department of Transportation to collect more data on the collision. TheNTSB said the crash remains under investigation and that it could make changes to its preliminary report as it doesmore research on the matter.