The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot: 17 fatalities, 736 crashes
Tesla’s driver-assistance system, known as Autopilot, has been involved in far more crashes than previously reported
June 10, 2023
The crash in North Carolina’s Halifax County, where a futuristic technology came barreling down a rural highway with devastating consequences, was one of 736 U.S. crashes since 2019 involving Teslas in Autopilot mode — far more than previously reported, according to a Washington Post analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. The number of such crashes has surged over the past four years, the data shows, reflecting the hazards associated with increasing use of Tesla’s driver-assistance technology as well as the growing presence of the cars on the nation’s roadways.
The number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Autopilot also has grown significantly, the data shows. When authorities first released a partial accounting of accidents involving Autopilot in June 2022, they counted only three deaths definitively linked to the technology. The most recent data includes at least 17 fatal incidents, 11 of them since May 2022, and five serious injuries.
Cummings said the number of fatalities compared with overall crashes was also a concern.
It is unclear whether the data captures every crash involving Tesla’s driver-assistance systems. NHTSA’s data includes some incidents in which it is “unknown” whether Autopilot or Full Self-Driving was in use. Those include three fatalities, including one last year.
NHTSA, the nation’s top auto safety regulator, began collecting the data after a federal order in 2021 required automakers to disclose crashes involving driver-assistance technology. The total number of crashes involving the technology is minuscule compared with all road incidents; NHTSA estimates that more than 40,000 people died in wrecks of all kinds last year.
Since the reporting requirements were introduced, the vast majority of the 807 automation-related crashes have involved Teslas, the data shows. Tesla — which has experimented more aggressively with automation than other automakers have — also is linked to almost all of the deaths.
Subaru ranks second with 23 reported crashes since 2019. The enormous gulf probably reflects wider deployment and use of automation across Tesla’s fleet of vehicles, as well as the broader range of circumstances in which Tesla drivers are encouraged to use Autopilot.
Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling.
“Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,” she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post. One likely cause, she said, is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-Driving, which brings driver-assistance to city and residential streets. “The fact that … anybody and everybody can have it. … Is it reasonable to expect that might be leading to increased accident rates? Sure, absolutely.”
The uptick in crashes coincides with Tesla’s aggressive rollout of Full Self-Driving, which has expanded from about 12,000 users to nearly 400,000 in a little more than a year. Nearly two-thirds of all driver-assistance crashes that Tesla has reported to NHTSA occurred in the past year.
Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has conducted research on autonomous-vehicle safety for 25 years, said the prevalence of Teslas in the data raises crucial questions.
“A significantly higher number certainly is a cause for concern,” he said. “We need to understand if it’s due to actually worse crashes or if there’s some other factor such as a dramatically larger number of miles being driven with Autopilot on."
While Tesla has constantly tweaked its driver-assistance software, it also took the unprecedented step of eliminating radar sensors from new cars and disabling them from vehicles already on the road — depriving them of a critical sensor as Musk pushed a simpler hardware set amid the global computer chip shortage. Musk said last year, “Only very high resolution radar is relevant.”
The company has recently taken steps to reintroduce radar sensors, according to government filings first reported by Electrek.
NHTSA has opened multiple probes into Tesla’s crashes and other problems with its driver-assistance software. One has focused on “phantom braking,” a phenomenon in which vehicles abruptly slow down for imagined hazards.
In one case last year, detailed by the Intercept, a Tesla Model S reportedly using driver-assistance suddenly braked in traffic on the San Francisco Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle pileup that left nine people injured, including a 2-year-old.
In other complaints filed with NHTSA, owners say the cars slammed on the brakes when encountering semi trucks in oncoming lanes.
