Highway surveillance footage from the San Francisco Bay Bridge has shown a Tesla Model S vehicle in self-drive mode changing lanes and coming to a sudden halt. This led to eight vehicles crashing.
Nine people, including a two-year-old child, were among the people injured. The traffic got jammed for one hour.
Just hours before the crash, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had announced that Tesla’s ‘full self-driving’ capability was available in North America, congratulating Tesla employees on a ‘major milestone.’
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, has said that it is launching an investigation into the incident which happened on Thanksgiving Day last year.
Tesla vehicles used its ‘autopilot’ driver assistance system and ‘full self-driving’ mode. They got involved in 273 known crashes from July 2021 to June of last year.
Recently, there have been complaints of abrupt ‘phantom braking,’ causing the vehicle to slam on their brakes at high speeds.
More than 100 such complaints were filed with NHTSA in a three-month period, according to the Washington Post.
The term ‘full self-driving’ has been criticized by other manufacturers and industry groups as misleading and even disastrous.
The NHTSA has started its investigation after 16 crashes involving Teslas.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles has also accused Tesla of false advertisement of its ‘Autopilot’ feature.
Tesla was worth more than $1 trillion at that point. However, now, Tesla has lost nearly 65 percent in market value in 2022.