US opens probe in another Tesla crash that killed motorcyclist

San Francisco, July 19

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened another probe into the Elon Musk-run Tesla crash that killed a motorcyclist in California earlier this month.

The latest probe aims to find whether the Autopilot advanced driver assistance system in a 2021 Tesla Model Y was in use at the time of the fatal crash, TechCrunch reported late on Monday.

Earlier this month, the US agency opened a probe into one such fatal crash in which a pedestrian was killed and involved a 2018 Tesla Model 3 in California.

The NHTSA is also probing another fatal Tesla crash in Florida which killed a 66-year-old Tesla driver and a 67-year-old passenger.

In May, the agency started investigating a crash involving a 2022 Tesla Model S that killed three people.

The latest probe is the 38th one of a crash involving a Tesla vehicle since 2016. Of those crashes, 18 were fatal.

Tesla's advanced driver assistance system, known as Autopilot, has increasingly come under scrutiny by the federal agency.

Last month, NHTSA "upgraded" its investigation into Tesla's Autopilot after discovering new incidents of the EVs crashing into parked first-responder vehicles.

The agency said in a notice that it was expanding its preliminary evaluation of Tesla Autopilot systems to an engineering analysis.

A recent report said that the NHTSA has linked 392 crashes to self-driving and driver assistance systems in 10 months and about 70 per cent of those were Elon Musk-owned Tesla vehicles.

The report mentioned that out of 392 crashes, 273 were Tesla vehicles using Autopilot or the Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta.

The NHTSA's special crash investigations (SCI) programme focuses on cases that are useful for examining special crash circumstances or outcomes from an engineering perspective.