The first U.S. fatality using self-driving technology took place in May when the driver of a Tesla S sports car operating the vehicle's "Autopilot" automated driving system died after a collision with a truck in Florida, federal officials said Thursday.
he government is investigating the
design and performance of Tesla's system.
Preliminary reports indicate the
crash occurred when a tractor-trailer rig made a left turn in front of the
Tesla at an intersection of a divided highway where there was no traffic light,
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said. The Tesla driver died
due to injuries sustained in the crash, which took place May 7 in Williston,
Florida, the agency said. The city is southwest of Gainesville.
Tesla said on its website that
neither the driver nor the Autopilot noticed the white side of the trailer,
which was perpendicular to the Model S, against the brightly lit sky, and
neither applied the brakes.
"The high ride height of the
trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare
circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer,"
the company said. The windshield of the Model S collided with the bottom of the
trailer.
By the time firefighters arrived,
the wreckage of the Tesla—with its roof sheared off completely—was hundreds of
feet from the crash site where it had come to rest in a nearby yard, assistant
chief Danny Wallace of the Williston Fire Department told The Associated Press.
The driver was pronounced dead, "Signal Seven" in the local
firefighters' jargon, and they respectfully covered the wreckage and waited for
crash investigators to arrive.
The company said this was the first
known death in over 130 million miles of Autopilot operation. It said the NHTSA
investigation is a preliminary inquiry to determine whether the system worked
as expected.
Tesla says that before Autopilot can
be used, drivers have to acknowledge that the system is an "assist
feature" that requires a driver to keep both hands on the wheel at all
times. Drivers are told they need to "maintain control and responsibility
for your vehicle" while using the system, and they have to be prepared to
take over at any time, the statement said.
Autopilot makes frequent checks,
making sure the driver's hands are on the wheel, and it gives visual and
audible alerts if hands aren't detected, and it gradually slows the car until a
driver responds, the statement said.
Tesla conceded that the Autopilot
feature is not perfect, but said in the statement that it's getting better all
the time. "When used in conjunction with driver oversight, the data is
unequivocal that Autopilot reduces driver workload and results in a
statistically significant improvement in safety," the company said.
The Tesla driver was identified as
Joshua D. Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio. He was a former Navy SEAL who owned a
technology company, according an obituary posted online by the Murrysville Star
in Pennsylvania.
Tesla's founder, Elon Musk,
expressed "our condolences for the tragic loss" in a tweet late
Thursday.
NHTSA's Office of Defects is
handling the investigation. The opening of the preliminary evaluation shouldn't
be construed as a finding that the government believes the Model S is
defective, NHTSA said in a statement.
The Tesla death comes as NHTSA is
taking steps to ease the way onto the nation's roads for self-driving cars, an
anticipated sea-change in driving where Tesla has been on the leading edge.
Self-driving cars have been expected to be a boon to safety because they'll
eliminate human errors. Human error is responsible for about 94 percent of
crashes.
NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind is
expected to release guidance to states next month defining the federal role in
regulating the vehicles versus the state role, and suggesting what laws and
regulations states might want to adopt. Federal officials and automakers say
they want to avoid a patchwork of state and local laws that could hinder
adoption of the technology.
Most automakers are investing
heavily in the technology, which is expected to become more widely available
over the next five years. Like the Model S, the first generation of
self-driving cars is expected to be able to travel only on highways and major
well-marked roadways with a driver ready to take over. But fully self-driving
vehicles are forecast to become available in the next 10 to 20 years.
Musk has been bullish about
Autopilot, even as Tesla warns owners the feature is not for all conditions and
is not sophisticated enough for the driver to check out.
This spring, Musk said the feature
reduced the probability of having an accident by 50 percent, without detailing
his calculations. In January, he said that Autopilot is "probably better
than a person right now."
One of Tesla's advantages over
competitors is that its thousands of cars feed real-world performance
information back to the company, which can then fine-tune the software that
runs Autopilot.
Other companies have invested
heavily in developing prototypes of fully self-driving cars, in which a human
would be expected to have minimal involvement—or none at all. Alphabet Inc.'s X
lab has reported the most crashes of its Google self-driving cars, though it
also has the most testing on public roads. In only one did the company
acknowledge that its car was responsible for the crash, when a retrofitted
Lexus SUV hit a public bus in Northern California on Valentine's Day.
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