Eleven accidents involving the Tesla autopilot have already been recorded.
What responsibility has the driving assistant?AutopilotFrom electric car maker Tesla in eleven traffic accidents in the United States over the past three years? The US road safety agency will try to determine it through an investigation, announced Monday.
«As part of the agency’s safety mission and in order to better understand the causes of certain Tesla-related accidents, the NHTSA is opening a preliminary investigation into the driver assistance systems (Autopilot) and the techniques implemented. to monitor, assist and enforce the driver’s engagement in driving while in use“, Said a spokesperson for the American agency NHTSA in a statement sent to AFP.
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The investigation will focus on the Model Y, X, S and 3 of the American brand, put on the market between 2014 and 2021, which resulted in the death of one person and 17 injuries. The eleven accidents mentioned by the US road safety agency occurred between January 2018 and today and took place in California, Florida, Michigan, and Texas, details the agency in a document. “NHTSA has confirmed that in each of these cases, the Tesla vehicle had either the Autopilot or the Traffic Aware Cruise Control system activated just before the crashes.She continues. The driving assistant says “Autopilot», Tesla is the subject of much controversy after a series of accidents involving vehicles of the company.
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The name of this technology proposed by Tesla is debated while no car from any manufacturer is technically able today to offer motorists a fully autonomous driving vehicle. “All cars available today require human control all the time», Explains the NHTSA.
The American automaker led by the whimsical Elon Musk does not say the opposite, recalling on its website that Autopilot technology requires “active monitoring by the driver and do not make the vehicle autonomous».
Far from complete autonomy
But Tesla, which posted net income of $ 1.14 billion in the second quarter of 2021 thanks to the delivery of a record number of vehicles exceeding 200,000 units, is often caught in double talk. At a conference earlier this year, Elon Musk said that full autonomy would become “evident (…) in the year“. In 2015, the American billionaire said that a fully autonomous vehicle would be available within two years.
Despite billions of dollars in research and development over the years, Tesla is in category 2 on the autonomy scale set by the professional organization Society of Automotive Engineers, far from the fifth step, synonymous with complete autonomy. Asked by AFP, Tesla did not immediately react to the opening of this investigation. On the stock market, the Tesla title lost 3.5% in the first exchanges on Wall Street, around 13:50 GMT, to 692.15 dollars.
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