NHTSA doesn’t presently require firms subject to the order to report automobile miles traveled or fleet dimension however may contemplate updating its crash-reporting necessities to incorporate extra contextual info.
Within the meantime, the company mentioned it’ll proceed to evaluate the crash reports and plans to launch information updates month-to-month.
Whereas the information is simply too restricted to make “any kind of significant conclusions,” Benoff mentioned, there are nonetheless developments price maintaining a tally of.
Autos with superior driver-assistance methods, as an illustration, “had been mostly broken within the entrance, which suggests the human drivers are operating into issues,” he famous.
In the meantime, AVs “had been mostly broken within the rear, which normally implies that another person did the crashing.”
However, Benoff added, “This information was solely ever supposed to identify developments and attainable points to analyze.”
NHTSA senior officers confirmed that the information had already been used to set off new investigations and recollects, and inform ongoing security probes.
Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assist system is underneath escalated scrutiny after a collection of crashes within the U.S. that resulted in additional than a dozen accidents and one loss of life. The company this month upgraded its investigation of the system to an engineering evaluation and later may search a recall of an estimated 830,000 automobiles.
The crashes — now totaling 16 — concerned Tesla automobiles with Autopilot engaged that had been pushed close to first-responder scenes and subsequently struck a number of stopped emergency automobiles concerned with these scenes.
NHTSA mentioned it additionally carefully reviewed 191 Tesla crashes involving a model of Autopilot, together with the Full Self- Driving beta, throughout its preliminary analysis. A few of these crashes had been recognized from NHTSA’s crash reporting mandate.
“All of the folks monitoring the race to autonomy aren’t going to search out this information as common as a result of that is not NHTSA’s job,” mentioned Carnegie Mellon’s Koopman. “NHTSA’s job is to search out defects and get them mounted, not be the scorekeeper.”