US safety regulators to investigate another fatal Tesla crash

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the USA began investigating a fatal crash involving a Tesla.

The investigation, which was opened in July, is the latest in a long string of inquiries by NHTSA’s Special Investigations program into crashes involving Tesla vehicles. This fatal crash, in which a pedestrian was killed, involved a 2018 Tesla Model 3 in California.

The federal agency has increasingly scrutinized Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system, also known as Autopilot. Last month, NHTSA “upgraded” its investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot after discovering new incidents of the EVs crashing into parked first-responder vehicles.

The agency said in a notice that it was expanding its preliminary evaluation of Tesla Autopilot systems to an engineering analysis. This means that the NHTSA will extend its existing crash analysis, evaluate additional datasets, perform vehicle evaluations, and evaluate whether Autopilot and associated Tesla systems may aggravate behavioral safety risks or human factors by undermining the effectiveness of the driver’s supervision, according to the agency.

The escalation is a critical and required step before NHTSA can issue a recall. According to NHTSA’s documents, an estimated 830,000 Tesla vehicles are involved in the probe.