A recent fatal accident has caused Tesla Motors Inc.to take a closer look at their automatic braking systems.
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The company has also cleared that for now, it is not sure if other factors were also involved and investigation into the matter is going on. On Tuesday, the U.S. National Transportation Security Board (NTSB) stated its preliminary findings revealed the Design S was taking a trip at 74 miles per hour (119 km per hour) in a 65-mph (104 km per hour) zone at the time it struck the semi-truck near Williston, Florida.
In the report, the NTSB also noted that the Model S driver had both the Autosteer lane-keeping assistance and the Traffic-Aware Cruise Control turned on.
The New York Times reported that during a Senate Commerce Committee meeting this week, an unnamed Tesla official cited a safety feature that is still relatively new but now vastly more common than semi-autonomous driving systems like Autopilot.
Tesla has maintained that the crash that claimed Brown’s life is a product of “extremely rare circumstances” as it has moved to defend the driver-assist system.
In the investigation, NHTSA has been trying to know whether the system poses an unreasonable risk to driver safety.
During his opening remarks at the Tesla Gigafactory battery manufacturing plant in Nevada on Friday evening, CEO Elon Musk expounded upon his plans for the auto of the future. When the factory is complete, it will be the largest building in the world by footprint and, if all goes according to plan, will eventually churn out enough batteries to supply 150 gigawatt hours of batteries per year. That’s enough for 1.5 million Model 3s. The Tesla Minibus will be built on a Model X chassis.
On Thursday, Staff members of Tesla Motors told congressional aides at an hour-long briefing that they were still trying to understand the system failure of auto that led to the crash. The first possibility suggests the failure of the vehicle’s cameras and radar to identify a crossing trailer.
Last month Tesla said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was investigating the accident in which one person died while driving in a 2015 Tesla Model S that was in autopilot mode. The company previously has said its system was not created to spot cross traffic, but it didn’t know if Tesla modified the system.
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In the briefing, Tesla officials told staffers that radar sensors connected to the automated braking system may have spotted the tractor-trailer, but the Model S computer may be created to “tune out” overhead structures, such as bridges and highway signs, “to avoid the triggering of false braking events”, the person said.
