Police say no one was in the driver’s seat following a fatal Tesla accident

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The crash in the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, killed one person in the front passenger seat and one in the back seat of the car, according to police officer Mark Herman, the head of the Harris County police department who responded to the crash.

“I can tell you that our investigators are sure that no one was in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash,” he told CNN on Monday.

The names of the two victims of the accident, a 69-year-old man and a 59-year-old man, were not released immediately by the authorities. The car, a 2019 Tesla Model S, apparently went off the road after not being able to navigate a curve and hit some trees. Herman said the accident was still under investigation and the exact speed was not yet known. However, he said that the evidence suggests that the car was traveling at a “high speed”.

Based on In the model year, the Tesla Model S has an “Autopilot” feature designed to help the driver keep the car on a traffic lane and slow down or stop the car to avoid obstacles in front. It may also have been equipped with a more advanced feature called Full Self-Driving capability, or FSD, which is now being tested by what Tesla CEO Elon Musk described as a small group of members of the public. . It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post.
The Telsa website warns that “the current characteristics of the autopilot require the active supervision of the driver and do not make the vehicle autonomous”. But just last Saturday, Musk wrote on Twitter stated that the Autopilot function was significantly safer than human drivers.

“Tesla with autopilot is now engaged approaching 10 times less chance of an accident than the average vehicle,” he wrote on Twitter.

Musk was referring to company data showing that Teslas, with the autopilot employed, was involved in a single accident for every 4.19 million miles traveled in the first quarter of this year, compared to National Traffic Safety Administration data that Tesla said it shows one accident every 484,000. miles for man-operated cars.

But these mileage comparisons are not necessarily valid, as drivers using autopilot may be more likely to activate it on high-access highways where there is a low chance of an accident, while NHTSA data covers all miles traveled, including on local streets with intersections.

Safety issues

There have been numerous criticisms of the Tesla autopilot system by safety experts, including the use of the name “autopilot”, which some of these critics say encourages owners to believe that the car can be driven alone.
The National Transportation Safety Council, when issuing a report on a 2018 fatal accident involving a Tesla using autopilot, said the carmaker is not doing enough to ensure drivers remain aware of their surroundings and are ready to take control of the car to avoid accidents.

“This tragic accident clearly demonstrates the limitations of the advanced driver assistance systems available to consumers today,” NTSB President Robert Sumwalt said in a February 2020 report on the 2018 accident in Mountainview, California. “Currently, there is no vehicle available for American consumers to drive alone. Period. Every vehicle sold to American consumers still requires the driver to be actively involved in the driving task, even when advanced driver assistance systems are activated. auto.”

adze (TSLA) did not respond to a request for comment about the accident. In the past, Tesla has defended the use of the name Autopilot, saying that even in the case of aircraft autopilot systems, the pilot is still required to be careful and prepared to take control in an emergency.

Constable Herman said his department has already been in contact with the NTSB and NHTSA regarding the crash. He has not been in contact with Tesla yet, he said.

The NTSB said it was aware of the accident and was not yet sure if it would investigate. But the NHTSA said it has already deployed a special accident investigation team to investigate the accident.

The real car revolution is a few years away

The autopilot function requires the driver’s seat belt to be engaged. It is also designed to alert the driver if he does not keep his hands on the steering wheel often enough.

Saturday’s accident resulted in a fire that caused firefighters on the scene to extinguish four hours, using 32,000 gallons of water, according to Herman.

Gasoline-powered cars generally have a higher risk of fire in an accident than a pure electric vehicle, but the large battery that powers these cars can catch fire if damaged in an accident. However, EV batteries take longer to ignite than gasoline.

– Matt McFarland of CNN Business and Peter Valdes-Dapena contributed to this report

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