NHTSA has identified 20 crashes that may be related to Autopilot since Tesla updated the system
- NHTSA released a letter to Tesla raising questions about the effectiveness of the Autopilot recall.
- The safety authority found 20 accidents in vehicles that were equipped with the safety update created as part of the recall.
- The government organization is also raising questions about how effective certain proposed safety improvements were and why later improvements were not included in the initial recall.
Late last month, American safety regulators announced they were reviewing the effectiveness of a Tesla recall involving more than 2 million vehicles equipped with the Autopilot driver assistance system. A letter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) now shows that the organization has received a total of 20 accident reports in Tesla vehicles since the recall remedy was introduced.
The goal of the NHTSA investigation is to evaluate the impact of the recall on three types of accidents: head-on, skid/understeer accidents and accidents involving unintentional steering oversteer. It also attempts to determine whether the updates introduced by the recall actually fixed the defects they were intended to fix.
More: Did Tesla’s Autopilot recall updates go far enough? The Feds have doubts and are investigating
“In his assessment of the remedy [the NHTSA Vehicle Research and Test Center] “could not detect any difference in the initiation of the driver warning cascade between the conditions before and after the remediation (camera obscured),” Gregory Magno, the head of NHTSA’s vehicle defect division, wrote in a letter to Tesla. The Office of Defects Investigations “will evaluate the adequacy of the recall warnings as part of this investigation.”
The regulator also fears that some of the remedies introduced by Tesla may be too easy for drivers to circumvent. For example, to avoid confusion, the automaker updated its vehicles so that Autopilot can be activated with a single touch. However, NHTSA noted that the update did not make this single-pull activation the default option and that drivers could turn one-pull activation on and off while their vehicle was in motion.
Additionally, Magno wrote that Tesla has made additional safety-related updates to the Autopilot system since the recall was implemented. These include a clearance to reduce seaplane accidents and another to improve performance when a vehicle using the ADAS system enters a turning lane at high speed. NHTSA says it will review the timing of these new features and Tesla’s basis for not including them in the Autopilot recall.
Now Tesla’s safety organization is requesting data on the performance of its vehicles before and after the safety update, including the number of warnings drivers received for taking their hands off the wheel.
When the NHTSA announced its investigation into the Tesla recall, it wrote that there was evidence that the automaker’s “weak driver engagement system” was suited to Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities and that this could lead to a “critical safety vulnerability.”
