Autopilot cited in death of Chinese Tesla driver
Tesla Motors faces questions about safety of its technology after the fatal crash in China
Tesla Motors came under renewed questioning about the safety of its autopilot technology after news emerged on Wednesday of a fatal crash in China that may have occurred while the automated driverassist system was operating.
The crash took place on January 20 and killed Gao Yaning, 23, when the Tesla Model S that he was driving slammed into a road sweeper on a highway near Handan, a city about 300 miles south of Beijing, according to a report broadcast on Wednesday by the Chinese government news channel CCTV.
The report includes in-car video looking through the windshield as the car travels in the left lane at highway speed just before ramming into a parked or slow-moving orange truck. The video, apparently shot by a camera mounted on the rear-view mirror, recorded no images, sounds or jolts that would suggest the driver or the car hit the brakes before impact. At that point, the incar video ends.
“When it was approaching the road sweeper, the car didn’t put on the brake or avoid it,” a police officer said in the CCTV report.
“Instead, it crashed right into it.” In an emailed statement, Tesla said on Wednesday that it had not been able to determine whether autopilot was active at the time of the Handan accident.
The company declined to say when it learned of the fatality in China, or whether it had reported the crash to United States safety officials, who are investigating a fatal accident in Florida on May 7 in which Autopilot was engaged.
So far, that Florida accident is the only confirmed death involving a Tesla with autopilot turned on. In that accident, there was no sign that the driver or autopilot had applied the brakes before the car collided at high speed with a tractor-trailer that had turned in front of it.
Although Tesla learned of the Florida accident a few weeks after it happened, it did not publicly disclose it until late June, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was investigating the crash.
News of the Chinese crash will renew questions about when the company should disclose information about accidents in cars equipped with autopilot and what information should be shared.
“Because of the damage caused by the collision, the car was physically incapable of transmitting log data to our servers, and we therefore have no way of knowing whether or not autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash,” a Tesla spokeswoman, Alexis Georgeson, said in the company’s statement.
“We have tried repeatedly to work with our customer to investigate the cause of the crash, but he has not provided us with any additional information that would allow us to do so,” she said of the car’s owner, Gao’s father.
She said Tesla was saddened to learn of the death of Gao. “We take any incident with our vehicles very seriously and immediately reached out to our customer when we learned of the crash,” she said.
Tesla and autopilot have been under scrutiny since the disclosure of the May fatality.