The Apple engineer killed when his Tesla crashed into a California highway barrier had activated the car’s autopilot feature and didn’t have his hands on the wheel in the last six seconds before impact, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.
The self-driving technology on the Tesla Model X had been used four times during the 32-minute trip, according to the report released Thursday, including in its last 19 minutes. While the vehicle warned the driver, Walter Huang, to put his hands on the steering wheel three separate times, the last of the visual and auditory alerts came 15 minutes before the March 23 collision.
“During the 60 seconds prior to the crash, the driver’s hands were detected on the steering wheel on three separate occasions, for a total of 34 seconds; for the last 6 seconds prior to the crash, the vehicle did not detect the driver’s hands on the steering wheel,” agency personnel wrote.
The details were disclosed amid growing concerns about the safety of self-driving cars, which have been supported by President Trump’s administration as a way to curb traffic fatalities. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who has previously backed the vehicles on similar grounds, ordered Uber to halt its tests in that state after the death of a pedestrian, a case also under investigation by the NTSB. The agency released preliminary findings on that accident last month.
A Tesla spokesperson pointed to a blog post from the company in the aftermath of the crash, which disclosed at the time that the driver’s hands were not on the wheel in the seconds before the crash.
Before the Tesla struck the barrier, its speed increased from 62 to 70.8 miles per hour and no “precrash braking or evasive steering movement” were detected, according to the NTSB. The 38-year old driver, who was found belted into his seat, was pulled from the burning vehicle and taken to a local hospital, where he died. The operators of two other cars that slammed into the Tesla afterward suffered minor or no injuries.
Tesla’ Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk previously criticized the news media for focusing too much on crashes involving self-driving technology.
“The thing that’s tricky with autonomous vehicles is that autonomy doesn’t reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero,” he told investors previously. “It improves it substantially.”
