The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) mentioned Monday it has requested Tesla to supply extra data after certainly one of its autos crashed into a hearth truck in California, Bloomberg reported.
The company didn’t affirm to TechCrunch what sort of data it’s in search of, however NHTSA seemingly needs to find out whether or not certainly one of Tesla’s superior driver help techniques (ADAS) — Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta — was engaged on the time of the crash.
The Contra Costa County hearth division tweeted concerning the incident Saturday, asking highway customers to decelerate and transfer over when approaching emergency autos.
“Truck 1 was struck by a Tesla while blocking I-680 lanes from a previous accident,” the tweet mentioned. “Driver pronounced dead on-scene; passenger was extricated & transported to hospital. Four firefighters also transported for evaluation.”
The tweet included photographs of the accident, together with a number of of a totally totaled Tesla.
NHTSA has opened dozens of particular crash investigations (SCI) into Tesla autos the place Autopilot was suspected of getting used. Of the 48 SCIs which were opened and closed between June 2016 and July 2022, 39 concerned Teslas. And of these 39, solely three have been confirmed to haven’t concerned Autopilot. NHTSA nonetheless has many open investigations into crashes involving Teslas, a few of which have been deadly. The company doesn’t touch upon open investigations.
This newest deadly crash comes a couple of days after Tesla issued a recall for 362,758 autos to replace its FSD software program after regulators mentioned FSD may enable the autos to behave unsafe round intersections and trigger crashes. The recall adopted a Super Bowl advert taken out by Tesla’s largest hater, The Dawn Project, that known as on regulators to ban FSD till important security defects are fastened.
Tesla has come beneath scrutiny from a variety of federal and state regulators for the protection of its ADAS. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice requested data from Tesla on Autopilot and FSD, doubtlessly as a part of a legal investigation into the corporate.