Tesla
Wednesday morning, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released data on the safety, or lack thereof, of advanced driver assistance systems. Since June 2021, automakers are required to notify the NHTSA if any of their vehicles crashes while using partially automated driving systems, also known as SAE Level 2 systems.
As many suspected, Tesla’s Autopilot system was responsible for most of the crashes since the start of the reporting period. In fact, Tesla’s accounted for three-quarters of all ADAS crashes — 273 of the 367 crashes reported between July 2021 and May 15, 2022. The news offers even more data that undermines Tesla’s safety claims about its Autopilot system.
In the past, Tesla and even NHTSA have claimed that Autopilot reduced the crash rate by 40 percent. However, as we reported in 2018, that claim fell apart when a consultancy called Quality Control Systems got their hands on the data.
Autopilot’s woes didn’t end there, though, and a series of Tesla Autopilot crashes eventually sent NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation into action. In August 2021, NHTSA’s ODI opened an investigation into 11 crashes in which Teslas crashed into emergency vehicles using Autopilot and upgraded that probe to a much more comprehensive technical analysis earlier in June. This comes on top of a separate NHTSA study into the tendency of newer Teslas — which lack forward-looking radar — to spontaneously brake. The investigation began in February.
Tesla’s Autopilot system has also been repeatedly singled out by the National Transportation Safety Board, which even criticized the NHTSA for failing to “recognize the importance of ensuring acceptable safeguards are in place so that the vehicles do not go beyond their operational design domains and capabilities.” of their system designs.”
Under the NHTSA’s new standing order, automakers (and operators, if applicable) must file incident reports about ADAS Level 2 accidents that occurred on a publicly accessible road in the United States or its territories.
In fact, they must report all accidents if a Level 2 ADAS system was operating within 30 seconds of the accident and the accident “involved a vulnerable road user2 or resulted in a fatal accident, a towing of the vehicle, activation of an airbag or a person transported to a hospital for medical treatment.”
(This may be intended to allay concerns that Tesla has programmed Autopilot to turn off if it determines that a crash is imminent. The human driver “less than a second before the crash.”)
The data in NHTSA’s latest dump is subject to some caveats. Access to crash data varies by manufacturer, and some incident data may be incomplete, the agency says. Some crashes can be reported more than once when the data comes in through the manufacturer, as well as as a complaint. The agency also notes that some data has been redacted in part to protect personally identifiable information or confidential business information, and the incident report summary data has not been normalized; it only shows up as an absolute number of crashes.
The most common source of crash data came from telematics; complaints and claims were the second most frequent source. Of the 402 crashes broken down by reporting entity, Tesla was way ahead, with 273 crashes in less than a year. The second-largest number of accidents involved Honda vehicles — in February, the NHTSA opened an investigation into the Japanese automaker’s ADAS after receiving nearly 300 complaints about phantom brakes. Subaru came in third, with only 10 crashes in the same period.
List image by Tesla
