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charon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Last Thursday the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration delivered the results of its investigation [wired.com] of the 2016 crash of Joshua Brown while he was driving a Tesla with Autopilot software.

"A safety-related defect trend has not been identified at this time and further examination of this issue does not appear to be warranted," NHTSA's investigators found. In other words: Tesla didn't cause Brown's death.

Hands Off

The verdict should relieve not just the electric car builder, but the industry at large. Semi-autonomous and driver assistance technologies are more than a fresh source of revenue for automakers. They're the most promising way to cut into the more than 30,000 traffic deaths on US roads every year. Today's systems aren't perfect. They demand human oversight and can't handle everything the real world throws at them. But they're already saving lives.

NHTSA's goal wasn't to find the exact cause of the crash (that's up to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is running its own inquiry), but to root out any problems or defects with Tesla's Autopilot hardware and software.

I cannot find a link to the actual PDF document that doesn't return an XML error page. The Google cached version is here [googleusercontent.com].

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