Automobile Safety Features and Defects
Self-Driving and Driver-Assist Technology Linked to Hundreds of Car Crashes
Over the course of 10 months, nearly 400 car crashes in the United States involved advanced driver-assistance technologies, the federal government’s top auto-safety regulator disclosed Wednesday, in its first-ever release of large-scale data about these burgeoning systems. In 392 incidents cataloged by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from July 1 of last year through […]
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Auto Safety Agency Expands Tesla Investigation
The federal government’s top auto-safety agency is significantly expanding an investigation into Tesla and its Autopilot driver-assistance system to determine if the technology poses a safety risk. The agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said Thursday that it was upgrading its preliminary evaluation of Autopilot to an engineering analysis, a more intensive level of […]
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How Safe Are Systems Like Tesla’s Autopilot? No One Knows.
Every three months, Tesla publishes a safety report that provides the number of miles between crashes when drivers use the company’s driver-assistance system, Autopilot, and the number of miles between crashes when they do not. These figures always show that accidents are less frequent with Autopilot, a collection of technologies that can steer, brake and […]
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Can A.I. All but End Car Crashes? The Potential Is There.
In Barcelona, Spain, a recent trial used computer vision technology on city buses to map places along the route where there were conflicts with vehicles, pedestrians and others, to identify where accident risks were highest. “When you collect that kind of data for an entire year with thousands of buses and thousands of streets, you […]
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13-Year-Old Boy Drove Truck That Hit Van in Texas, Killing 9, Officials Say
A 13-year-old boy was behind the wheel of a pickup truck that struck a van in Texas on Tuesday night in a collision that killed nine people, including a college golf coach and six of his players, along with the boy and a man traveling with him, officials said on Thursday. Bruce Landsberg, vice chairman […]
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Regulators Investigate Tesla Over Reports of ‘Phantom Braking’
The federal government’s main auto-safety regulator has opened a preliminary investigation into sudden braking by Tesla cars equipped with an advanced driver-assistance system that the company calls Autopilot. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a document posted online this week that it was acting in response to 354 consumer complaints from the last […]
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Tesla Recalls Cars With Full Self-Driving to Prevent Rolling Stops
Tesla is recalling 54,000 cars equipped with its Full Self-Driving software to disable a feature that in certain conditions lets the vehicles roll slowly through intersections without stopping. The move comes after the automaker was criticized on social media for enabling “rolling stops” in violation of traffic regulations. “Failing to stop at a stop sign […]
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Tesla Reports 87% Increase in 2021 Deliveries
Tesla reported Sunday that it delivered 936,000 cars in 2021, an 87 percent increase from the year before, despite the computer chip shortage that has disrupted auto production around the world. In the fourth quarter alone, the company delivered more than 308,000 vehicles, a 71 percent increase from the quarter a year earlier. The overwhelming […]
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Snow Closed the Highways. GPS Mapped a Harrowing Detour in the Sierra Nevada.
The road once carried stagecoaches during the Gold Rush, twisting its way through what is now a national forest and an area of the Sierra Nevada known for snowmobiling. In the winter, the rugged passage, known as the Quincy-La Porte Road or County Road 511 in Plumas County, Calif., is closed. But Wendy Becktold, an […]
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