A new report shows Tesla dashcam footage of a violent crash where the vehicle smashes into a stopped police car while Autopilot is engaged. The video demonstrates how poorly Autopilot handles stopped emergency vehicles and how any impaired driver can cause a crash like this. Officers injured at the scene are blaming and suing Tesla over the incident.
The video is one of many obtained by the Wall Street Journal related to an investigation by the NHTSA. That investigation has been going on since mid-2021 and involves the way that Autopilot handles emergency vehicles stopped on the road. To this point, it’s been implicated though not determined to be at fault, in at least 16 crashes.
In the main video shown in the WSJ’s report, a Tesla Model X seems to smash into a stopped police car with basically no warning at all. Dig a little deeper into the details and who’s at fault becomes a lot more murky.
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WSJ also obtained data from the Tesla in the crash which shows numerous calls for more attention from the driver. In fact, by the time the crash happens, it’s alerted the driver to pay more attention no less than 150 times over the course of about 45 minutes. Nevertheless, the system didn’t recognize a lack of engagement to the point that it shut down Autopilot.
At about that 45-minute mark, the Tesla crashes into a stopped police cruiser in the far right lane. Data from the Autopilot system shows that it recognized the stopped car 37 yards or 2.5 seconds before the crash. Autopilot also slows the car down before disengaging altogether. It’s quite clear from the film that any alert driver would’ve recognized the situation and changed lanes.
The officers injured in the crash are suing Tesla, not the allegedly impaired driver, as a result of the accident. Tesla says that the fault lies with the driver. In at least one other case, that’s exactly what a court found. Autopilot seems to have worked exactly as intended and an impaired driver failed to do their job from behind the wheel here.
And the reality is that any vehicle on cruise control with an impaired driver behind the wheel would’ve likely hit the police car at a higher speed. Autopilot might be maligned for its name but drivers are ultimately responsible for the way they choose to pilot any car, including a Tesla.