A new report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the United States claims that ‘Full Self-Driving’ and ‘Autopilot’ enabled Tesla’s have killed somewhere around 29 people since 2018.
To be transparent, of those 29 fatalities, some included crashes with other vehicles or other cars hitting the Tesla. That said, there are specifically 211 crashes where the Tesla ran into something with Autopilot or Full Self-Driving enabled, and out of those, 11 people have died, and 49 have been injured.
The NHTSA started looking into these Tesla crashes after reports started coming in that the vehicles struck emergency vehicles parked on the sides of roads. It appears that after dark, these driver assistance programs don’t seem to notice warning lights, flares, traffic cones, or illuminated arrow boards, according to a report from The Verge.
The biggest problem this report uncovered is that when using these systems drivers start to loose focus on the road and their attention wanders. Then, when something bad happens, the driver doesn’t have the critical seconds required to react and slam on the breaks. This is partly due to Tesla’s design as well. The company disengages its Autopilot feature whenever a driver attempts to correct it, essentially scolding drivers for taking control.
Other systems from major manufacturers allow drivers to adjust course without turning off their level 2 driver assistance programs. In essence, this means that drivers can work with their lane guidance system instead of choosing between using it and fully driving.
On top of all this, Tesla’s level 2 driver assistance program is called Autopilot, which in itself is confusing.
This all came to light right after Elon Musk told investors that Tesla plans to release a full self-driving robot taxi this summer.
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