BEIJING, April 20 Two men were killed when a Tesla Model S crashed into a tree and burst into a fire while driving on a highway in Texas on the evening of April 17, local time.
Police in Texas will issue a search warrant for Tesla Inc. on Tuesday local time to obtain data on the crash, Reuters reported. Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said Thursday that the autopilot system for the vehicle involved in the accident was not activated.
However, Harris County Fourth Division Sheriff Mark Herman noted that evidence, including eyewitness testimony, clearly showed that the driver’s seat was not in the driver’s seat when the accident hit the tree.
He said Musk tweeted Thursday afternoon that the company’s current data logs ruled out the car starting a self-driving system, the first official news from Tesla since the accident. “If he tweeted this, if he had extracted the data, he wouldn’t have told us.” “We’re anxiously waiting for this data,” Herman said. ”
It was the 28th Tesla accident investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating Tesla, the report said. The NTSB is understood to have disqualified it from participating in an investigation into a fatal accident in 2018 after the company made unauthorized disclosure of details of the accident investigation.
According to Herman, in the 17th accident, the 2019 Model S was driving at high speed near Houston when it broke out of the road and hit a tree before bursting into flames after failing to make it through a bend.
Authorities found two bodies in the car, one in the co-pilot’s seat and the car’s owner in the back seat. “We have witness testimony that the two men were specifically designed to test driverless features and showed friends how the car was driven autonomously.”
Tesla’s self-driving system, Autopilot, is known to handle some driving tasks, and in some cases the driver’s hand can even leave the steering wheel. However, the company said the self-driving system “requires active supervision by the driver and cannot allow the vehicle to drive autonomously”.
Musk also dismissed on Twitter the idea that the vehicle’s semi-autonomous driving software was to blame for the accident, saying: “The data logs recovered so far show that the autopilot system is not up and that the car did not purchase a fully autonomous driving system (FSD). ”
He added: “The standard self-driving system requires lane lines to open, but there is no (lane line) on this street.” Musk’s meaning here, the report said, is that the autopilot system can only be activated if the vehicle’s camera captures the signposts.
Tesla is reported to be able to obtain operational and diagnostic data transmitted to servers “on a regular basis” from the car seized by police. It was not immediately clear whether investigators would be able to obtain dashcam data directly from the badly burned accident vehicle.
