Pete Buttigieg, the United States’ transportation secretary, said this week that regulators have concerns about how drivers interact with Tesla’s level 2 advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), Autopilot.
Buttigieg made the comments against the background of an ongoing investigation into the system by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Launched in 2021, the organization is looking at a large number of crashes in which Autopilot may have played a role.
“There is a real concern that’s not limited to the technology itself but the interaction between the technology and the driver,” Buttigieg said, per Reuters. “The question is, how can we be sure that they will lead to a better set of safety outcomes […] This technology has a lot of promise. We just have to make sure it unfolds in a responsible fashion.”
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NHTSA has said it is “working really fast” on its probe into Autopilot, and upgraded it to an engineering analysis in June 2022, the last stage of an investigation before a recall is either demanded or cleared.
However, last month, Tesla won an important court battle relating to an accident in which Autopilot was engaged. Jurors found that driver distraction was to blame for the accident, not Autopilot. Jurors in the case said that drivers were responsible for the vehicle, whether or not an ADAS system was engaged.
That same argument may not fly with regulators, though. NHTSA said that in most of the crashes under review, drivers complied with Tesla’s alerts, raising questions about their effectiveness. The National Transportation Safety Board called the automaker’s driver engagement monitoring systems “ineffective” in 2020, and criticized NHTSA for providing “scant oversight.”
What comes of Buttigieg and regulators’ “real concerns” will be interesting to see, and will likely have wide-ranging impacts for the rest of the auto industry, where ADAS technology has become part of the features arms race.
