Washington state authorities have determined that a Tesla car that struck and killed a motorcyclist near Seattle in April was operating using the company’s “full self-driving” system at the time of the accident.
Washington State Police investigators made the discovery after downloading information from the accident data recorder of a 2022 Tesla Model S, department spokesman Capt. Dion Glover said Tuesday.
“The investigation into this incident remains ongoing,” Glover said in an email to The Associated Press.
He said Snohomish County prosecutors will decide whether to file charges in the case.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said last week that “full self-driving” cars should be able to drive without human supervision by the end of the year.
He has been promising the introduction of robot taxis for several years, and on the company’s earnings call he acknowledged that his predictions on the issue had been “previously too optimistic.”
A message seeking comment was left with Tesla on Tuesday.
After the crash about 15 miles northeast of Seattle, the driver told officers he was using Tesla’s Autopilot system and was looking at his phone while driving.
“The next thing he knew he heard a loud noise and his vehicle suddenly lurched forward, accelerating and striking the motorbike in front of him,” officers wrote in charging documents.
The 56-year-old driver was arrested on suspicion of vehicular homicide after “he admitted to being inattentive while driving while in Autopilot mode and to being distracted by his cell phone while moving forward and allowing the machine to take control of the vehicle,” according to the affidavit.
The motorcyclist, 28-year-old Jeffrey Nissen of Stanwood, Washington, was underneath the vehicle and pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.
Nissen’s death is at least the second fatal accident in the United States linked to Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration previously released a study finding one fatality and 75 crashes involving the system.
It is unclear whether the system was responsible for the fatal accident.
Tesla has two partially automated driving systems: Full Self-Driving, which can handle many driving tasks in cities, and Autopilot, which can keep the car in its lane and away from obstacles ahead. Tesla owners and the public sometimes get the names mixed up.
Tesla says neither system is currently capable of driving itself, and a human driver must be ready to take over control at any time.
“Full Self-Driving” is being tested on public roads by selected Tesla owners, something the company recently dubbed FSD Supervision.
Musk said last week that he doesn’t think government regulatory approval will be a limiting factor in the adoption of robotaxis: “If the future shows that unsupervised FSD is safer than humans over billions of miles, what regulator is going to stop it?” he asked.
But Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies self-driving car safety, said he doesn’t see Tesla operating robot taxis on nearly every road without human drivers within the next decade.
Musk said the safety record he cited is based on a human driver overseeing the self-driving system. “Unless there is data showing that self-driving doesn’t need to be overseen by a human driver, there is no basis to claim that self-driving is sufficiently safe,” he said.
Musk said Tesla will unveil its dedicated robotaxi fleet at an event on October 10.
The event was postponed from August 8th due to changes Musk wanted to make to the vehicle.
Mr. Musk has told investors that Tesla is more of a robotics and artificial intelligence company than a car company, and many are buying into the company based on the long-term prospects for robotics technology.
Musk has touted self-driving cars as a driver of growth for Tesla since the company’s “full self-driving” hardware launched in late 2015.
