Tesla Autopilot Faces U.S. Inquiry After Series of Crashes

Tesla has acknowledged that Autopilot can sometimes fail to recognize stopped emergency vehicles. And safety experts, videos posted on social media and Tesla drivers themselves have documented a variety of weaknesses of Autopilot.

In some accidents involving the system, drivers of Teslas have been found asleep at the wheel or were awake but distracted or disengaged. A California man was arrested in May after leaving the driver’s seat of his Tesla while it was on Autopilot; he was sitting in the back of his car as it crossed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

At least one person died in one of the 11 crashes with emergency vehicles that are under investigation by the agency. Just days after Christmas in 2019, Derrick and Jenna Monet were driving on Interstate 70 in Indiana west of Indianapolis when their Tesla slammed into a parked fire truck, the Indiana State Police said at the time. Mrs. Monet, who was 23 years old and a passenger in the Tesla Model 3, died. Mr. Monet, who was driving the car, could not be reached for comment.

Some of the other crashes resulted in serious injuries. In February, local police officers in Montgomery County, Texas, north of Houston, were conducting a traffic stop when one of their vehicles was hit by a Tesla. Several officers and a dog were treated for minor injuries, and a person at the scene was taken to the hospital with severe injuries, according to a local official. The Tesla driver was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. In another crash, last year in Nash County, N.C., near Raleigh, the sheriff’s office said on Facebook that the Tesla driver had been watching a movie.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-nhtsa.html