Time.news – A day to forget for Tesla: a double accident in Houston, Texas, cost the lives of two people, who were aboard a self-driving Tesla model S. Saturday evening, the vehicle was accelerating when it crashed into a tree and it immediately caught fire. The tragedy also had sensitive repercussions on the stock market where the stock went down: it closed the session on Wall Street, losing 3.4% at the end of the session but even losing 6%.
On the serious episode they now want to see clearly the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) who both announced the opening of an investigation.The fact that the car was self-driving has raised doubts about the reliability of this type of vehicles, which represent the last frontier of the car. Authorities want to understand if the vehicle’s advanced driver assistance system, known as Autopilot, was on at the time of the accident.
It is the same function as the autopilot that requires the driver’s seat belt to be fastened in order to be inserted, and is also designed to alert the driver if he is not keeping his hands on the wheel frequently.
The incident was also echoed in Congress where Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, called for “full oversight” to prevent deaths related to advanced driver assistance systems. “Using Tesla’s driverless system – or any other – shouldn’t be a risk of death,” he tweeted. “Advances in driving technology must first and foremost be safe.”
Autopilot is designed for driving while keeping the car in a traffic lane and slowing or stopping the car to avoid obstacles ahead. Specifically, that car model, the Tesla model S, may also have been equipped with a more advanced feature called the Full Self-Driving capability, or FSD, which is now being tested but for now it is not known whether Tesla involved in the last Saturday’s incident was equipped with this advanced software.
No comment for now from Tesla which has previously stated multiple times how Autopilot makes its vehicles safer than others. The fact that Autopilot is inserted does not ‘de-responsibility’ the driver: the company in fact always recommends paying attention to the road in any case and being ready to take control of the vehicle. On the website, the company explains in detail that “current Autopilot functions require active driver supervision and they do not make the vehicle autonomous“.
And just in the past few days, before the accident happened, the CEO himself Elon Musk tweeted that the Autopilot feature is significantly safer of ‘human’ drivers: “Tesla with Autopilot on is 10 times less likely to crash than the average vehicle,” he said. According to the data quoted by Musk and which are those of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Tesla with the autopilot engaged have been involved in only one accident for every 4.19 million miles traveled in the first quarter of this year. The same data, Tesla recalled, reports one accident every 484,000 miles for human-driven cars.
But those who criticize Autopilot point out that this type of mileage comparisons are unreliable, since drivers using Autopilot may be more likely to activate it on restricted-access highways where there is less chance of an accident, while NHTSA covers all miles driven, including those on local roads with secondary roads.
Always according to critics, even the use of the name “Autopilot” would be wrong, which would encourage owners to believe the car can actually drive on its own. It must also be said, as some American media report that the National Transportation Safety Board, in reporting on a fatal accident that occurred in 2018 and which had involved a Tesla with the Autopilot inserted, had ruled that the car manufacturer did not was doing enough to ensure that drivers remained aware and ready to take control of the car to avoid accidents.
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