NHTSA Closes Investigation into Fatal Tesla Model S Autopilot Crash; No Recall Issued

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to speak about the agency's findings.
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Regulators with the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shuttered a six-month investigation digging into the operations of Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot functions without issuing a recall Thursday.

The investigation was opened on June 28th after 40-year-old Joshua Brown was killed inside of his Tesla Model S on May 7th when his car drove directly into the side of a tractor-trailer at 74 miles per hour in a 65-mph speed zone on a highway in Williston, Florida. Data collected from the wrecked car showed that its Traffic-Aware Cruise Control and Autosteer lane-keeping self-driving functions were in use at the time of impact, and no efforts were made by the driver or the car to slow down or avoid the crash. 

In a statement released with the closed investigation, the NHTSA said that it did not find any evidence of a defect that would require Tesla to issue a safety recall of its cars. The report noted that Tesla’s Automatic Emergency Braking technology is “not designed to reliably perform in all crash modes, including crossing path collisions.”

In a blog post on Tesla’s website following the accident, the company wrote that the Autopilot system couldn’t see “the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter Thursday to share the NHTSA’s findings. 

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After the Florida crash came to light, several other close-call incidents and crashes that were allegedly caused by the self-driving software found their way to the Internet. In September, Tesla unveiled several updates to its semi-autonomous Autopilot software that could potentially help curtail distracted driving when the system is engaged. 

The full report from the NHTSA can be found here