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A Timeline of the Tesla Autopilot Crash Investigation

A Timeline of the Tesla Autopilot Crash Investigation 0

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This image taken from a video shows the scene of an accident involving a Tesla Model X on March 23.
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March 23: Walter Huang, a 38-year-old Apple Inc. engineer, dies after his Model X crashes into highway barrier in Mountain View, California. 

March 27: The NTSB sends two investigators to the crash scene and notes on Twitter: “Unclear if automated control system was active at time of crash.”

March 27: Tesla releases its first blog post, “What We Know About Last Week's Accident,” saying it hasn’t been able to retrieve computer logs from Huang’s vehicle and blames the damaged highway safety barrier for the severity of the crash. Tesla also claims the U.S. government found a year ago that Autopilot reduced crash rates by 40 percent, a characterization of data from a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report that some safety experts call misleading. “Out of respect for the privacy of our customer and his family, we do not plan to share any additional details until we conclude the investigation,” Tesla writes.

March 30: Tesla releases a second blog post late on Friday night that acknowledges its driver-assistance software, Autopilot, had been engaged at the time of the crash. “The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision,” Tesla writes.

April 1: An NTSB spokesman tells reporters that the agency is “unhappy with the release of investigative information by Tesla.” The agency’s protocols require companies who are a party to an agency accident investigation to not release details about the incident to the public without NTSB's approval. 

April 2: Tesla CEO Elon Musk discusses the investigation on Twitter: 

April 9: NTSB discloses agency Chairman Robert Sumwalt spoke to Musk over the preceding weekend. An agency spokesman said Sumwalt described the conversation as “very constructive.” 

April 10: Tesla puts out a statement that faults Mr. Huang and denies moral or legal liability for the crash.

“According to the family, Mr. Huang was well aware that Autopilot was not perfect and, specifically, he told them it was not reliable in that exact location, yet he nonetheless engaged Autopilot at that location. The crash happened on a clear day with several hundred feet of visibility ahead, which means that the only way for this accident to have occurred is if Mr. Huang was not paying attention to the road, despite the car providing multiple warnings to do so.”

April 11: Tesla says it has withdrawn from its party agreement with the NTSB: “We believe in transparency, so an agreement that prevents public release of information for over a year is unacceptable.”

April 12: NTSB releases a statement saying it had removed Tesla as a party to its crash investigation. “The NTSB took this action because Tesla violated the party agreement by releasing investigative information before it was vetted and confirmed by the NTSB.” The agency also releases a letter from its chairman to Musk. 

April 12: Tesla releases another statement, again claiming to have withdrawn from its agreement with the NTSB.

“It’s been clear in our conversations with the NTSB that they’re more concerned with press headlines than actually promoting safety. Among other things, they repeatedly released partial bits of incomplete information to the media in violation of their own rules, at the same time that they were trying to prevent us from telling all the facts. We don’t believe this is right and we will be making an official complaint to Congress. We will also be issuing a Freedom Of Information Act request to understand the reasoning behind their focus on the safest cars in America while they ignore the cars that are the least safe.  Perhaps there is a sound rationale for this, but we cannot imagine what that could possibly be.” 

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/a-timeline-of-the-tesla-autopilot-crash-investigation

Tesla Driver Died Using Autopilot, With Hands Off Steering Wheel

Tesla Driver Died Using Autopilot, With Hands Off Steering Wheel 0

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  • A week after crash, company says it recovered computer logs
  • Driver received several visual, one audible ‘hands-on’ warning

Tesla Inc. confirmed the Model X driver who died in a gruesome crash a week ago was using Autopilot and defended the safety record of its driver-assistance system that’s back under scrutiny following a fatality.

Computer logs recovered from the Tesla driven by Wei Huang, 38, show he didn’t have his hands on the steering wheel for six seconds before the sport utility vehicle collided with a highway barrier in California and caught fire on March 23, according to a blog post the company published late Friday.

“The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive,” Tesla said in the post. The driver had “about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view” of the concrete highway divider and an already-crushed crash cushion that his Model X collided with, according to the company. “But the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.”

The collision occurred days after an Uber Technologies Inc. self-driving test vehicle killed a pedestrian in Arizona, the most significant incident involving autonomous-driving technology since a Tesla driver’s death in May 2016 touched off months of finger-pointing and set back the company’s Autopilot program. A U.S. transportation safety regulator said Tuesday it would investigate the Model X crash, contributing to Tesla’s loss of more than $5 billion in market value this week.

‘Mushy Middle’

“This is another potential illustration of the mushy middle of automation,” Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies self-driving cars, said in an email. Partial automation systems such as Tesla’s Autopilot “work unless and until they don’t,” and there will be speculation and research about their safety, he said.

Tesla defended Autopilot in the blog post, saying a vehicle equipped with the system is 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. U.S. statistics show one automotive fatality every 86 million miles driven by all vehicles, compared with 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot, according to the company.

Devastating Event

“None of this changes how devastating an event like this is or how much we feel for our customer’s family and friends,” Tesla wrote, pushing back against criticism that it has lacked empathy by bringing up safety statistics to counter past scrutiny of Autopilot. “We must also care about people now and in the future whose lives may be saved if they know that Autopilot improves safety.”

Tesla has introduced driver-assistance features through Autopilot that the company continuously improves via over-the-air software updates. While the company said as of October 2016 that it was building all of its cars with hardware needed for full self-driving capability, it hasn’t said when its vehicles will clear testing and regulatory hurdles necessary to drive without human involvement.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board sent investigators to look into the crash. The agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also are examining a Jan. 22 collision in Los Angeles involving a Tesla Model S using Autopilot and a fire truck parked on the freeway.

NTSB Findings

The NTSB concluded in September that Autopilot’s design was a contributing factor in the 2016 fatal crash in Florida involving a Model S driver who’d been using the system and collided with a semi-trailer truck. The agency criticized Autopilot for giving “far too much leeway to the driver to divert his attention to something other than driving.”

In the wake of that crash, Tesla updated Autopilot to stop allowing drivers to ignore repeated warnings to keep their hands on the wheel.

While the NTSB also criticized partially autonomous-driving systems that only monitor steering wheel movement and don’t measure whether drivers are looking at the road, Tesla hasn’t adopted or enabled scanners that can track whether drivers’ eyes are looking ahead toward the road.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-31/tesla-says-driver-s-hands-weren-t-on-wheel-at-time-of-accident

Uber Halts Autonomous Car Tests After Fatal Crash in Arizona

Uber Halts Autonomous Car Tests After Fatal Crash in Arizona 0

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  • First known pedestrian death involving a self-driving vehicle
  • Incident may raise questions about safety of technology

Uber Technologies Inc. halted autonomous vehicle tests after one of its cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in what is likely the first pedestrian fatality involving the technology.

The 49-year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk when the Uber vehicle operating in autonomous mode under the supervision of a human safety driver struck her, according to the Tempe Police Department.

After the incident, which happened at 10 p.m. local time on Sunday, she was transferred to a nearby hospital, where she died from her injuries. "Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation," Liliana Duran, a Tempe police spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

Uber said on Monday that it was pausing tests of all its self-driving vehicles on public roads in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto and the greater Phoenix area. “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident."

Companies including Alphabet Inc., General Motors Co., Uber and Baidu Inc. are investing billions of dollars to develop autonomous-vehicle technology because it has the potential to transform the auto industry, transportation in general and the way cities work. One analyst has estimated Alphabet’s Waymo unit is worth at least $70 billion. The fatality in Tempe could slow testing, delay commercialization and undermine such optimism.

Testing has expanded to complex urban areas as states like Arizona and Texas take a light-touch regulatory approach and companies race to be first to commercialize the technology. That’s helped improved the systems, but also increased the chance of a pedestrian death. Experts have long worried about the impact deadly crashes could have on the nascent industry.

"We’re within the phase of autonomous vehicles where we’re still learning how good they are. Whenever you release a new technology there’s a whole bunch of unanticipated situations," said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school. "Despite the fact that humans are also prone to error, we have as a society many decades of understanding of those errors."

The National Transportation Safety Board is opening an investigation into the death and is sending a small team of investigators to Tempe, about 10 miles east of Phoenix. The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration dispatched a special crash investigation team.

The NTSB opens relatively few highway accident probes each year, but has been closely following incidents involving autonomous or partially autonomous vehicles. Last year, it partially faulted Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot system for a fatal crash in Florida in 2016.

The NTSB’s cautionary tone on the emergence of self-driving technology contrasted with the Department of Transportation, which revised its policy on self-driving vehicles last year in an attempt to remove obstacles to the testing of such vehicles.

"As always we want the facts, but based on what is being reported this is exactly what we have been concerned about and what could happen if you test self-driving vehicles on city streets," said Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a Washington-based advocacy group. "It will set consumer confidence in the technology back years if not decades. We need to slow down."

The Phoenix area is a fertile ground for experiments in the technology. Uber has been testing there with safety drivers behind the wheel. Late last year, Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, which has tested in the Phoenix area for years, began removing the safety drivers to transport a small number of residents. (Waymo staff sit in the back seat.) General Motors Co. is also testing in the Phoenix area. A GM spokesman declined to comment, and a representative from Waymo didn’t return multiple requests for comment.

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"Public safety is our top priority, and we are in communication with law enforcement, which is investigating the accident and gathering facts, as well as Uber," a spokesman for Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said.

Uber has had incidents in the past. Last year, Uber suspended its self-driving car program after one of its autonomous vehicles was involved in a high-impact crash in Tempe. The Uber vehicle was not responsible for the incident, and there were no injuries, the police said at the time.

"Tempe has been supportive of autonomous vehicle testing because of the innovation and promise the technology may offer," Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell said in a statement on Monday. "Testing must occur safely. All indications we have had in the past show that traffic laws are being obeyed by the companies testing here. Our city leadership and Tempe Police will pursue any and all answers to what happened in order to ensure safety moving forward."

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-19/uber-autonomous-car-involved-in-fatal-crash-in-arizona