830,000 Tesla cars involved in fed probe, possible recall
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The US NHTSA says it will widen its investigation to include Tesla's autopilot functions.
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The NHTSA has said that there aren't currently any vehicles that are fully automated or self-driving.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has escalated its probe into Tesla's Autopilot function.
The NHTSA first began its investigation last year after 11 crashes took place with stationary first responder vehicles since 2018. These 11 crashes resulted in 17 injuries and one death, prompting the agency to begin investigating 765,000 Tesla cars almost 10 months ago.
The probe has now been widened to review data from 830,000 Tesla cars, and almost 200 new cases of accidents that involved Tesla cars that had the Autopilot functions turned on.
This is now, as per the agency, being treated as an "engineering analysis", a necessary step before a possible recall of cars equipped with autopilot.
According to a release by the NHTSA, the investigation will "explore the degree to which Autopilot and associated Tesla systems may exacerbate human factors or behavioral safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver's supervision."
Tesla's warning system, as per the agency, was found to have been activated just before impact. Moreover, the "Automatic Emergency Braking" system kicked in for about half of the crashes, and in these crashes, Autopilot aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact, on average.
Tesla has a lot on its plate to answer by June 20, as the NHTSA is also investigating 758 cases of "phantom braking" in a separate investigation, where drivers complained that their cars braked suddenly as they were traveling at high speeds.
