It starts in 2016, with the first accidents involving Tesla owners driven by Autopilot: in some cases - the most recent - the investigations showed that at the moment of impact no one was sitting in the driver's seat, therefore it would have been impossible to regain control of the car as suddenly as required by the system itself.
The NHTSA has focused on an important aspect of Autopilot several times: the software installed on the Tesla requires you to remain alert and ready to regain control in every mom ento, but the way it is designed allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel for very long periods of time, thus encouraging distractions.
Just a few days ago, the president of the US Senate Commerce Commission, Maria Cantwell , spoke of the episodes that saw Tesla cars involved in somewhat strange accidents, underlining how there is always the hand of Autopilot in these collisions.
But it is not only Tesla that is under investigation: according to Reuters reports, among the cases investigated there are also other accidents involving Cadillacs, a Lexus RX450H, a Navy Arma and two Volvo XC90s. The latter in 2018 became the protagonist of a tragic accident in which a woman lost her life in Arizona, during the conduct of tests related to autonomous driving by Uber which on that occasion was guilty of having deactivated the Emergency braking system present as standard on the model.
All this talk and debate does not stop the growth of autonomous driving systems, however, with Elon Musk preparing to release a new version of the Full Self-Driving software , after abandoning the use of radar to focus on cameras.