On April 19, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared a tweet denying claims that his company was involved in a fatal car crash in Spring, Texas.
Two people were killed when a Tesla car, likely operating on Autopilot, crashed and caught fire in Texas on the evening of April 17. One victim was found in the passenger seat of the Model S and the other was in the back seat. The car crashed into a tree north of Houston after it was traveling at a high rate of speed and failed to turn around a curve, Harris County Sheriff Mark Herman said. The victims’ locations and other evidence indicate that no one was driving the vehicle at the time of the crash, Herman said.
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Federal officials have criticized Tesla for fire hazards related to the batteries in its cars, also noting that the company is not doing enough to prevent drivers from using the driver-assist feature.
Two federal agencies – the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) – are currently investigating the accident.
Local police said in multiple press conferences that, apparently, no one was driving the 2019 Tesla Model S when it left the road, crashed into a tree and burst into flames, according to preliminary investigations.
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Musk in the tweet he shared stated the following: "Data logs recovered so far indicate that Autopilot was not engaged and this car had not purchased FSD. Additionally, standard Autopilot would require lane markings to be engaged, which this road did not have."
Tesla sells its automated driving systems under the names Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD). It is also releasing a beta version of the FSD software to some customers who have the premium FSD option, which costs $10,000.
Tesla Autopilot and FSD are not capable of controlling electric vehicles in all normal driving conditions, and the company's owner's manuals warn drivers to use them only with "active supervision.
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Autopilot, which is now standard in Tesla vehicles, doesn't always recognize lane markers perfectly – for example, it can confuse bike lanes with other lane markings.
Additionally, the system can be misused or even abused by drivers. A teenage driver recently demonstrated this in a demonstration video he posted on social media, showing that he could leave the driver's seat with his Tesla car's Autopilot system still in use.
Finally, Elon Musk defended his vehicles by writing on his Twitter account that a Tesla with Autopilot is 10 times less likely to be involved in an accident than an average vehicle.
