The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into Tesla on Thursday, reports the Associated Press. Though every preventable death is a tragedy, not every death should trigger a federal investigation and potential recall of overwhelmingly safe technology. The NHTSA’s overzealous scrutiny of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature is unwarranted and counterproductive.
The NHTSA lists a total of four crashes in its Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) report. Only one of the crashes involved an injury, which was unfortunately fatal. The November 2023 accident occurred when a Tesla Model Y using FSD collided with a Toyota 4Runner that had stopped to respond to a previous collision on Interstate 17 in Rimrock, Arizona. The accident killed a 71-year-old woman, per A.P.
The ODI report cites “reduced roadway visibility…from conditions such as sun glare, fog, or airborne dust” as contributing to all four crashes involving Tesla FSD. These conditions don’t just hinder the functioning of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) but human drivers as well. The collision that the 4Runner had stopped to assist was caused by sun glare, as was the fatal Tesla crash. Both the human drivers and the ADAS system were vulnerable to diminished visibility, but only the latter is the subject of a federal investigation.
This isn’t the first time the NHTSA has scrutinized Tesla. The agency began investigating the car manufacturer in August 2021 after 11 collisions involving Tesla’s autopilot and first responders occurred between 2018 and 2021. In 2022, NHTSA expanded its investigation, recording 956 crashes “where Autopilot was initially alleged to have been in use at the time of, or leading up to” incidents from January 2018 to August 2023, 29 of which were fatal.
The report concluded that “drivers involved in the crashes were not sufficiently engaged in the driving task” due to insufficient warnings from the autopilot and autosteer features. But the responsibility of driving rests squarely on the operator of the vehicle.
Drivers are often insufficiently attentive to the task at hand—driving a multi-hundred-pound mass of metal and glass—and people are too frequently harmed and killed as a result. One might expect that vehicle fatalities have increased as a consequence of the growing prevalence of ADAS, but that’s not the case.
The NHTSA’s April 2024 Early Estimate of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities reports 40,990 deaths due to motor vehicle crashes. This number is horrifying at first glance, but represents the “seventh consecutive quarterly decline in fatalities beginning with the second quarter of 2022.” Fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled have also decreased, from 1.33 in 2022 to 1.26 in 2023 (the most recent years for which data are available).
Even as ADAS systems have become “increasingly available as standard or optional equipment in many new vehicles across most manufacturers” according to the NHTSA, driving has become safer, not more dangerous. ADAS, like human drivers, are not infallible. And driving, like all other human activities, is not completely safe. However, at what is still a relatively early stage in its deployment, ADAS is associated with safer driving on balance and Tesla’s FDS feature should not be recalled due to one fatality.
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