Two men in Texas died in an accident of cars after crashing into a tree in a Tesla Model S, which caught fire immediately after impact. According to the police, no one was sitting in the driver’s seat at the time of the accident: the two men on board, both between 50 and 60 years old, were found one in the passenger seat, and the other in one of the rear seats. The car would not have been able to complete a curve while going at high speed in a winding area, according to the police, and would therefore have gone off the road.
For the moment it is not possible to establish whether Tesla’s Autopilot was in operation during the accident, a semi-autonomous driving function that helps the driver to handle the vehicle in particular conditions: the car can for example keep or change lanes, enter or getting out of a parking lot with some difficulty and braking in front of an obstacle. Although a car equipped with Autopilot is not completely autonomous – Tesla itself warns that the driver must always keep their hands on the wheel – the name given to the function, “Autopilot”, has been criticized by many as misleading: it would give the impression that the system can completely replace the driver, rather than just helping him. At the end of March, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US agency that deals with road safety, had announced that it had opened investigation of 27 incidents of Tesla cars.
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