US likely to single out Tesla for crashes involving Autopilot after collecting data on automated driving
- Tesla’s crash rate per 1,000 vehicles is substantially higher than data from other carmakers given to the Associated Press
- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been collecting data for a year, previously documenting more than 200 crashes involving Tesla Autopilot
In coming days, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to issue figures it has been gathering for nearly a year. The agency said in a separate report last week that it had documented more than 200 crashes involving Teslas that were using Autopilot, “Full Self-Driving”, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control or some other of the company’s partially automated systems.
Tesla’s figure and its crash rate per 1,000 vehicles was substantially higher than the corresponding numbers for other carmakers that provided such data to the Associated Press ahead of NHTSA’s release. The number of Tesla collisions was revealed as part of a NHTSA investigation of Teslas on Autopilot that had crashed into emergency and other vehicles stopped along roadways.
Tesla does have many more vehicles with partly automated systems operating on US roads than most other carmakers do – roughly 830,000, dating to the 2014 model year. And it collects real-time data online from vehicles, so it has a much faster reporting system. Other carmakers, by contrast, must wait for reports to arrive from the field and sometimes don’t learn about crashes for months.
