Feds have opened investigations into 10 Tesla crash deaths since 2016
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US safety regulators said they’ve opened 30 investigations into Tesla crashes that included 10 deaths since 2016 in which Autopilot was suspected to have been in use.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a list to Reuters with details about accidents under review by the agency’s special crash investigations programs.
The agency has previously confirmed individual investigations into specific Tesla crashes, but had not released a full list of all Tesla crashes investigated when Autopilot, or advanced driver assistance, was suspected of being involved.
The NHTSA has found that the Autopilot system, which automates some parts of driving but doesn’t make the car fully autonomous, was not responsible for at least three of the crashes, according to Reuters.
The National Transportation Safety Board has previously blasted Tesla over its lack of safeguards for Autopilot, which has been linked to at least three fatal crashes since 2016.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday, but the Elon Musk-led automaker has warned drivers that the advanced features “require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
The NHTSA said in March that it was running 23 ongoing probes of Tesla crashes. At that time, the agency had already completed four other investigations and published the results.
The Silicon Valley car maker has previously faced criticism for allegedly overstating the features of Autopilot, misleading consumers to believe that it can autonomously operate a Tesla car.
The recent accounting by the NHTSA comes after a Tesla car crashed in Texas in April, killing two people. Local police said at the time that they believed no one was behind the wheel.
“With the physical evidence and the things of that nature on the scene, that night the position of the bodies, the trajectory of the impact, they are 100 percent certain that no one was in the driver seat driving that vehicle at the time of impact. They are positive,” Harris County Constable Mark Herman told local reporters.
With Post wires
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