US car safety agency upgrades probe into Tesla Autopilot crashes

NHTSA opened the investigation last August following string of crashes involving the cars and parked emergency vehicles

A US car safety agency says it has upgraded its investigation into a string of crashes involving Tesla electric vehicles with the company’s Autopilot driver assistance system.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it was boosting its probe into 830,000 Tesla vehicles. It opened the investigation last August following a string of crashes involving the cars and parked emergency vehicles.

An upgrade of the investigation to an engineering analysis is needed before the NHTSA can demand any recall of the vehicle’s built by Elon Musk’s company.

The NHTSA said the upgrade is “to extend the existing crash analysis, evaluate additional data sets, perform vehicle evaluations, and to explore the degree to which Autopilot and associated Tesla systems may exacerbate human factors or behavioral safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver’s supervision.”

The agency says that it has reports of 16 accidents, which caused one death and seven injuries, caused by Tesla vehicles in Autopilot that hit parked road maintenance and first-responder vehicles.

NHTSA says that its own analysis shows that in crashes Autopilot aborted vehicle control “less than one second prior to the first impact.”

And it added that “where incident video was available, the approach to the first responder scene would have been visible to the driver an average of 8 seconds leading up to impact.”

It also says that it has separately opened 35 special crash investigations into Tesla vehicles in which Autopilot or other advanced systsems are suspected of use. These crashes have allegedly caused 14 deaths since 2016.

Reuters contributed to this report.