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Since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started demanding automakers provide crash data involving advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), Tesla vehicles have led the number of fatal crashes. The latest batch of data adds two more deaths to Tesla’s list, bringing them to a total of 16 among the 18 NHTSA has learned of since July 2021.
That means Tesla’s count is even higher. On May 7, 2016, Joshua Brown’s Model S drove under a tractor-trailer in Florida. That was the first official death involving Autopilot. On March 23, 2018, Wei “Walter” Huang crashed his Model X on Autopilot into a traffic barrier on a California highway and died at the hospital. On May 5, 2021, Steven Michael Hendrickson’s Model 3 hit an overturned truck in California. Hendrickson used to share on social media that his car was autonomous.
With those cases in mind, there are actually 21 deaths with ADAS involvement, and 19 happened in a Tesla. One of the deaths in which no car from the EV maker was involved occurred with a Ford vehicle. We do not know which carmaker was involved with the other one.
The new fatal crashes happened between September 15 and October 15, which is the period for the most recent data reports submitted by all automakers using ADAS in their cars. According to Bloomberg, both were with Tesla Model 3 units using Autopilot.
The new report comes when Tesla is under an engineering analysis from NHTSA for crashes against emergency vehicles. The company is also under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for autonowashing (promising a car is more autonomous than it really is), something the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) also accused Tesla of doing. The accusation also led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to check if Tesla was misleading its investors with false promises.
Tesla seems not to be worried by any of that. Elon Musk announced that Tesla would make a wide release of Full Self-Driving (FSD) by the end of the year, meaning all owners who paid to use the beta software will get it regardless of the Safety Score system Tesla established. Traffic safety organizations have been urging the U.S. government to take FSD off the roads even with Safety Score working. They believe Tesla’s evaluation system actually makes people drive more dangerously.
With those cases in mind, there are actually 21 deaths with ADAS involvement, and 19 happened in a Tesla. One of the deaths in which no car from the EV maker was involved occurred with a Ford vehicle. We do not know which carmaker was involved with the other one.
The new fatal crashes happened between September 15 and October 15, which is the period for the most recent data reports submitted by all automakers using ADAS in their cars. According to Bloomberg, both were with Tesla Model 3 units using Autopilot.
The new report comes when Tesla is under an engineering analysis from NHTSA for crashes against emergency vehicles. The company is also under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for autonowashing (promising a car is more autonomous than it really is), something the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) also accused Tesla of doing. The accusation also led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to check if Tesla was misleading its investors with false promises.
Tesla seems not to be worried by any of that. Elon Musk announced that Tesla would make a wide release of Full Self-Driving (FSD) by the end of the year, meaning all owners who paid to use the beta software will get it regardless of the Safety Score system Tesla established. Traffic safety organizations have been urging the U.S. government to take FSD off the roads even with Safety Score working. They believe Tesla’s evaluation system actually makes people drive more dangerously.
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