Footage shows Tesla making sudden lane change and braking
Crash just hours after Musk touted expanded “Full Self-Driving”
A big crash on the San Francisco Bay Bridge last Thanksgiving Day injured nine people including a two-year-old child and blocked the bridge for over an hour. Now a new report has surveillance footage showing the Tesla Model S that started the chain reaction pile-up.
The footage was obtained by The Intercept, along with the official Highway Patrol traffic crash report. The footage shows the Tesla Model S changing lanes and then braking abruptly. The resulting crash involved eight vehicles.
I obtained surveillance footage of the self-driving Tesla that abruptly stopped on the Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle crash that injured 9 people including a 2 yr old child just hours after Musk announced the self-driving feature.
Full story: https://t.co/LaEvX9TzxW pic.twitter.com/i75jSh2UpN
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) January 10, 2023
The driver of the car told police that he had been using the Tesla “Full Self-Driving” feature and that the car’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.”
The crash came just hours after Tesla CEO Elon Musk Tweeted to announce that “Full Self-Driving Beta” was now available to any owner in North America. The exec congratulated company employees on the “major milestone.”
US safety regulator the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, has said it is launching an investigation into the incident. Tesla vehicles using the company’s “Autopilot” system (“Full Self-Driving” is a set of features that works on top of this system) have been involved in 273 known crashes from July 2021 through June 2022, the report says. That’s around 70 percent of crashes where advanced driver assistance systems were involved.
The NHTSA is also investigating a tweet from Musk where he said that “Full Self-Driving” feature users would get an option to turn off the reminder to keep their hands on the steering wheel. The FSD function is a hands-on system, requiring the driver to be ready to drive at any moment.
