- NHTSA has published a letter it sent to Tesla, asking questions about the efficacy of its Autopilot recall.
- The safety regulator identified 20 crashes in vehicles equipped with the safety update that was created as part of the recall remedy.
- The government organization is also asking questions about how effective certain proposed safety improvements were, and why later improvements weren’t included as part of the initial recall.
Late last month, America’s safety regulators revealed that they were looking into the efficacy of a Tesla recall that involved more than 2 million vehicles equipped with the Autopilot driver assistance system. Now, a letter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reveals that the organization has received a total of 20 crash reports in Tesla vehicles since the recall remedy was installed.
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NHTSA’s investigation will seek to evaluate the impact of the recall on three crash types: frontal, spin/understeer, and accidents in which inadvertent steering override was involved. It will also seek to determine if the updates introduced by the recall have actually resolved the defects they were supposed to fix.
More: Did Tesla’s Autopilot Recall Updates Go Far Enough? Feds Have Doubts And Are Investigating
“In its evaluation of the remedy, [the NHTSA Vehicle Research and Test Center] was unable to identify a difference in the initiation of the driver warning cascade between pre-remedy and post-remedy (camera obscured) conditions,” wrote Gregory Magno, the chief of NHTSA’s vehicle defects division, in a letter to Tesla. The Office of Defects Investigations “will evaluate the adequacy of recall remedy warnings as part of this investigation.”
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The regulatory body is also concerned that some of the remedies introduced by Tesla might be too easy for drivers to override. For instance, in an effort to reduce confusion, the automaker updated its vehicles so that Autopilot could be engaged with a single pull of a stalk. However, NHTSA found that the update did not make this single-pull activation the default option, and found that drivers could turn one-pull activation on and off while their vehicle was in motion.
Moreover, Magno wrote that Tesla has introduced further safety-related updates to the Autopilot system since the recall was rolled out. These include a release to reduce hydroplane crashes, and another to improve performance when a vehicle using the ADAS system enters a high-speed captive turn lane. NHTSA says it will assess the timing of these new features, and Tesla’s basis for not including them as part of its Autopilot recall.
Now, the safety organization is seeking data from Tesla on its vehicles’ performance before and after the safety update, including the number of warnings drivers received for taking their hands off the wheel.
When it announced its investigation into Tesla’s recall, NHTSA wrote that there was evidence to suggest that the automaker’s “weak driver engagement system was appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities” and that this might result in a “critical safety gap”.
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