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Tesla fatal crash: 'autopilot' mode sped up car before driver killed, report finds
A Tesla driving in "autopilot" mode crashed in March when the vehicle sped up and steered into a concrete barrier, according to a new report on the fatal collision, raising fresh concerns about Elon Musk's technology.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that four seconds before the 23 March crash on a highway in Silicon Valley, which killed Walter Huang, 38, the car stopped following the path of a vehicle in front of it. Three seconds before the impact, it sped up from 62mph to 70.8mph, and the car did not brake or steer away, the NTSB said.
[...] The NTSB report [...] has once again raised serious safety questions about the limits and performance of the autopilot technology, which is meant to assist drivers and has faced growing scrutiny from experts and regulators. Mark Fong, an attorney for Huang's family, also said the report appeared to "contradict Tesla's characterization" of the collision.
The NTSB press release includes this link to the preliminary report, for anyone inclined to read the slightly longer version of events.
The Mountain View Fire Department applied about 200 gallons of water and foam to extinguish the post-crash fire. The battery reignited five days after the crash in an impound lot and was extinguished by the San Mateo Fire Department.
Layoffs at Tesla
Tesla Lays Off 9 Percent Of Workforce
Tesla will lay off about 3,500 workers in an effort to boost profitability, CEO Elon Musk wrote in a company email.
"What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable," Musk wrote.
Musk conceded that Tesla has not made an annual profit in 15 years. The company posted its largest quarterly loss, of more than $700 million, earlier this year.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:41PM
> After all, a human drove into the barrier just a few weeks prior to the Tesla.
Before that human/Prius hit the barrier, how many hundreds of thousands of human-driven cars passed that point safely? And how many more after the Prius accident, in the weeks before the Tesla cleaned it out? Don't know, but most of them did. Is there any data on the Prius driver, were they impaired or distracted? Did they just graze the barrier enough to damage it, or did they auger in?
Now -- how many Tesla cars on Autopilot passed that point safely? I don't know, but many, many times less, maybe only this one? It was an area with merging and I'll wager that at least some Tesla drivers would have their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road at a critical point like this.