EXCLUSIVE: SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE OF TESLA CRASH ON SF’S BAY BRIDGE HOURS AFTER ELON MUSK ANNOUNCES “SELF-DRIVING” FEATURE
Musk has said Tesla’s problematic autopilot features are “really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”
HIGHWAY SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE from Thanksgiving Day shows a Tesla Model S vehicle changing lanes and then abruptly braking in the far-left lane of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle crash. The crash injured nine people, including a 2-year-old child, and blocked traffic on the bridge for over an hour.
The video and new photographs of the crash, which were obtained by The Intercept via a California Public Records Act request, provides the first direct look at what happened on November 24, confirming witness accounts at the time. The driver told police that he had been using Tesla’s new “Full Self-Driving” feature, the report notes, before the Tesla’s “left signal activated” and its “brakes activated,” and it moved into the left lane, “slowing to a stop directly in [the second vehicle’s] path of travel.”
Just hours before the crash, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had triumphantly announced that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” capability was available in North America, congratulating Tesla employees on a “major milestone.” By the end of last year, Tesla had rolled out the feature to over 285,000 people in North America, according to the company.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, has said that it is launching an investigation into the incident. Tesla vehicles using its “Autopilot” driver assistance system — “Full Self-Driving” mode has an expanded set of features atop “Autopilot” — were involved in 273 known crashes from July 2021 to June of last year, according to NHTSA data. Teslas accounted for almost 70 percent of 329 crashes in which advanced driver assistance systems were involved, as well as a majority of fatalities and serious injuries associated with them, the data shows. Since 2016, the federal agency has investigated a total of 35 crashes in which Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” or “Autopilot” systems were likely in use. Together, these accidents have killed 19 people.
In recent months, a surge of reports have emerged in which Tesla drivers complained of sudden “phantom braking,” causing the vehicle to slam on its brakes at high speeds. More than 100 such complaints were filed with NHTSA in a three-month period, according to the Washington Post.