Tesla on Autopilot

Tesla Crashes Into Fire Truck While Reportedly on Autopilot

An ugly scene makes a bad week worse for Tesla.

By David Grossman
TWITTER

A Tesla Model S, reportedly using the Autopilot feature, smashed into the back of a parked fire truck on a freeway accident scene in southern California.


The Autopilot claim comes from the Twitter feed of the Culver City Fire Department, a small city within Los Angeles County though it has yet to be confirmed by an independent news outlet. Telsa has the capability of determining if and when a car had Autopilot enabled.

At the time of the crash, fire truck was parked across the left emergency lane and carpool lane with emergency vehicles behind it and to its side. Those vehicles both had their lights flashing. Fortunately no one was killed when the the Model S crashed into the truck at 65 MPH.

This is the second Tesla involved in an incident in California, the car company's home state, in the past week. Over the weekend a drunk driver in San Francisco was arrested for being passed out behind the wheel of a Tesla. When woken up by highway police, the inebriated driver claimed the car was on Autopilot.

After each incident, Tesla issued statements that Autopilot is “intended for use only with a fully attentive driver.” This is in line with last year's National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Tesla report, which was delivered after a fatal Tesla crash in 2016.

"Systems available to consumers today, like Tesla’s ‘Autopilot’ system, are designed to assist drivers with specific tasks in limited environments," said NTSB Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt III at the time. "These systems require the driver to pay attention all the time and to be able to take over immediately when something goes wrong."

Despite the warnings, Tesla has been accused in the past of making Autopilot seem like a safer feature than it actually is. On Tesla's website, there are no warnings about driver attentiveness on the Model S page or Autopilot page, which only notes that all Tesla cars "have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

In a 2017 TED Talk, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that by 2019 the company's cars will have self-driving technology so advanced that they will be “unlikely to crash in a minimum of 100 lifetimes” and allow drivers to sleep through their rides. It's not quite there yet.