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Summary
- The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has formed a special crash investigation team to investigate a crash involving Tesla’s Model Y.
- The car was running on Autopilot in Michigan and rammed to a State Police sedan on a freeway.
- This comes close on the heels of a similar accident in Detroit last week
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has formed a special crash investigation team to investigate a crash involving Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Model Y which was running on an Autopilot in Michigan. The Tesla Autopilot, which is the company’s partially automated driving assistance system, rammed to a State Police sedan on a freeway.
This is the second crash involving Tesla in a gap of just few days. NHTSA is also investigating a crash that happened on 11 March in Detroit involving a Tesla car and a tractor trailer. The incident left a passenger critically injured.
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In a statement, the chief safety regulator of the USA said that NHTSA has set up a Special Crash Investigation team in keeping with the regulator’s oversight responsibilities and authority to ensure safety norms are abided by motor vehicles, including automated technologies and this team would be investigating the crash.
The regulator had earlier opened several accident investigations in Tesla crashes where the Autopilot might have been directly responsible for the crash. Those investigations, however, could not find any fault in the car manufacturer and its technology.
After the Detroit incident, TV channels ran videos of a heavily damaged Tesla car that was crushed beneath the truck. The co-passenger was said to be critical after being admitted in a local hospital, but the driver’s condition was unknown.
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In the Michigan crash, the driver of Tesla, who said the vehicle was on Autopilot, ran into the police’s sedan as they were investigating another crash involving a different vehicle and a deer. The emergency light on the police sedan was on and it was parked on the right lane of a highway, the Michigan Police said in a statement on Twitter.
The police said that the policeman and the driver did not sustain injuries and the driver was given a citation for driving with a suspended license and for failing to move over.
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In the last four years, Tesla has been involved in three fatal crashes and in all of them the Autopilot mode was in operation. Over the last four years, there have been three incidents of Tesla’s in serious crashes with Autopilot system in function.
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Tesla’s website says that its systems can control various functions of a car but must be done under driver supervision. Its advanced Autopilot system is marketed as full self-driven and is sold at $10,000. Experts say that the Autopilot and self-driven models are unsafe to be driven without a driver. Though the Autopilot system has undergone various changes over the years, but it has been under constant scrutiny since 2016, after an owner died driving the car while the Autopilot was operational.
