Tesla autopilot is accused of a large-scale accident: 8 cars collided, 9 people were injured, including a child
At the end of November, on Thanksgiving Day, there was a large-scale traffic accident in a tunnel in California (USA). Then 8 cars collided, 9 people received minor injuries, in particular, a child was hospitalized. And the culprit of this accident may be Tesla’s autopilot.
What does mean
The California Highway Patrol (CHP) reviewed the footage from the tunnel and found that the accident was caused by a Tesla: the car made an unsafe lane change, and then sharply reduced its speed from 88 km/h to 32 km/h. As a result, the cars following him crashed into each other.
A police report says the Tesla driver is blaming the automaker’s Full Self-Driving software, which apparently malfunctioned. But the Highway Patrol can’t yet confirm whether the app was working at the time of the incident.
The incident is being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), along with several other fatal crashes in California and Florida, and another in Utah that killed a motorcyclist.
Each of these crashes involved Tesla’s Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), Autopilot, or the $15,000 Full Self-Driving (FSD) software package, which performs many of the same tasks as Autopilot on local and residential the streets The Full Self-Driving package covers functions such as automatic lane change, lane selection, self-parking, red light stopping, traffic sign identification through the navigator and identification of obstacles on the road.
At the same time, Tesla representatives state that the responsibility for the safe operation of a car operating on autopilot or fully autonomous driving rests with the driver.
