Fatal Tesla Crash With Fully Autonomous Driving (Monitored) Triggers NHTSA Investigation

All Tesla vehicles with fully autonomous driving (monitored) in the US are currently under investigation by the NHTSA after a fatal accident raised doubts about the system’s handling in poor visibility conditions.

Automakers are required to report when they become aware of accidents involving their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), such as Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD. These reports are called Standing General Orders (SGO).

In reviewing Tesla’s SGOs, NHTSA believes it has identified a troubling pattern as reports involving a fatal accident were linked to reduced visibility.

NHTSA wrote in its report:

The Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) has identified four Standing General Order (SGO) reports in which a Tesla vehicle experienced an accident after entering an area of ​​reduced visibility on the road and using FSD Beta or FSD Supervised (collectively FSD) was activated. In these accidents, the reduced visibility of the road was due to conditions such as sunlight, fog or dust in the air. In one of the accidents, the Tesla vehicle fatally struck a pedestrian. One injury was reported in another accident under these conditions.

This prompted the agency’s Office of Defect Investigation (ODI) to initiate a preliminary assessment of Tesla’s FSD, which covers all Tesla vehicles built since 2016.

The investigation attempts to assess the following:

• The ability of FSD’s engineering controls to detect and respond appropriately to reduced disturbances
  visibility on the road;
• Whether other similar FSD accidents have occurred in poor road visibility
  and if so, the circumstances that contributed to these accidents; And
• Any updates or modifications made by Tesla to the FSD system that may affect the performance of the FSD in limited road visibility. This review particularly assesses the point in time
  The purpose and possibilities of such updates as well as Tesla’s assessment of their security
  Effects.

A preliminary ODI assessment is one of the first steps toward a recall, but Tesla has gone through this process several times, and in most cases the automaker has been able to avoid significant recalls that were not simply caused by over-the-air software updates .

Electrek’s take

The problem of poor visibility is certainly not new. Even simple sunlight can sometimes completely weaken Tesla’s FSD. Fog is also an issue that I’ve experienced several times, but the most common thing I get from FSD is a bad weather alert warning of a drop in performance.

Generally on such occasions I assess the weather and if it’s something I can easily deal with as a human driver I give FSD a chance, but if not I don’t take any chances.

But it’s pretty clear that with current hardware, both HW3 and HW4, Tesla is not equipped for FSD to handle many weather conditions, making Level 5 autonomy impossible despite Elon Musk’s claims to the contrary.

Level 4 autonomy, which takes into account certain exceptions to road conditions, is the limit, even if there are doubts about it.