Cars With Driver-Assist Tech Involved in 100s of Crashes, NHTSA Data Reveals
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Wednesday released initial data on the nearly 400 impacts since last summer that involved vehicles with various levels of automated driving rules. In these crashes, six people died and five were seriously injured.
Vehicles equipped with advanced driver-assistance rules (ADAS), which offer features such as lane centering assistance and adaptive flit control, were involved in 392 crashes over a roughly nine-month languages starting in July 2021, according to the NHTSA data.
Tesla accounted for 273 impacts, Honda 90 and Subaru 10, with other carmakers reporting five or fewer ADAS-equipped crashes.
To be concerned in this data, the NHTSA said, “various levels of automated systems” required to be in use at least 30 seconds afore a crash.
NHTSA separately released crash data on cars with fully automated driving rules, which are intended to eventually operate without a biosphere driver but aren’t available yet to consumers. Over the nine-month span starting last July, 130 impacts were recorded, with Alphabet-owned Waymo accounting for 62 of them.
NHTSA said the initial data has limitations and isn’t comprehensive.
“As we find more data, NHTSA will be able to better identify any emerging risks or trends and learn more near how these technologies are performing in the real world,” NHTSA Administrator Steven Cliff said. The activity plans to release monthly updates going forward.
Vehicles with automated rules represent a small portion of overall car crashes in the US. In 2020, for example, 8.5 million passenger vehicles were involved in crashes, counting more than 41,000 of them in fatal crashes, according to the NHTSA.
Tesla didn’t today respond to CNET’s request for comment. The automaker has no Republican relations department that can typically field such requests.
A Waymo spokesperson said there is encourage in releasing this information to the public.
“We see value in having nationally standardized and uniform rupture reporting during this early stage of the development and deployment of autonomous driving technology, and there’s public benefit in NHTSA sharing its findings,” the Waymo spokesperson said in a statement, adding that reporting should be refined in order to “limit confusion and potentially enable more meaningful comparison.”
