Hundreds of crashes are linked to Autopilot and Full Self-Driving

Collision of a Student Falling off the School Bus in March 2023: Tesla is on the verge of releasing an autonomous car

An investigation shows that in March of 2023 a student stepped off the school bus when he was struck by a Model Y at highway speeds. The Tesla driver was using Autopilot, the automaker’s advanced driver-assist feature that Elon Musk insists will eventually lead to fully autonomous cars.

The findings cut against Musk’s insistence that Tesla is an artificial intelligence company that is on the cusp of releasing a fully autonomous vehicle for personal use. The company plans to unveil a car this year that is supposed to be the start of a new era. Musk said on his earnings call that his vehicles were safer than human-driven cars.

“If you’ve got, at scale, a statistically significant amount of data that shows conclusively that the autonomous car has, let’s say, half the accident rate of a human-driven car, I think that’s difficult to ignore,” Musk said. At this point, stopping autonomy means killing people.

These fatal crashes killed 14 people and injured 49, according to data collected and published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal road-safety regulator in the US.

Government engineers wrote that, throughout their investigation, they “observed a trend of avoidable crashes involving hazards that would have been visible to an attentive driver.”

Regulators concluded that the product name of the Autopilot system discouraged drivers from collaborating with it. Automotive competitors often use “assist,” “sense,” or “team” language, the report stated, specifically because these systems aren’t designed to fully drive themselves.