DETROIT– Authorities in Washington have determined that a Tesla that struck and killed a motorcyclist near Seattle in April was operating the company’s “Full Self Driving” system at the time of the crash.
Investigators with the Washington State Patrol made the discovery after downloading information from the event data recorder on the 2022 Tesla Model S, agency spokesman Capt. Deion Glover said Tuesday.
“The investigation in this case is ongoing,” Glover said in an email to The Associated Press. The Snohomish County district attorney will determine whether to file charges in the case, he said.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said last week that “Full Self Driving” could be operating without human supervision by the end of this year. He has been promising a fleet of robotaxis for several years. During the company’s earnings conference, he acknowledged that his predictions on this issue “have been overly optimistic in the past.”
A message was left on Tuesday asking Tesla for comment.
After the crash in a suburb about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northeast of Seattle, the driver told an officer he was using Tesla’s Autopilot system and was checking his cell phone while the Tesla was moving.
“The next moment there was an explosion and the vehicle shot forward as it accelerated, colliding with the motorcycle in front of him,” the officer wrote in a probable cause document.
The 56-year-old driver was arrested on investigation of vehicular manslaughter, “based on his admitted inattention to drive while in autopilot mode and his cell phone distraction while driving forward, relying on the machine to move in front of him,” the statement said.
The motorcyclist, Jeffrey Nissen, 28, of Stanwood, Washington, was under the car and pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.
Nissen’s death is at least the second in the U.S. involving Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system. In investigative documents, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration previously said there had been one death and 75 crashes found while the system was usedIt was not clear whether the system was responsible for the fatal accident.
Tesla has two partially automated driving systems, “Full Self-Driving,” which can perform many driving tasks, even on city streets, and Autopilot, which can keep a car in its lane and out of the way of objects in front of it. The names are sometimes confused by Tesla owners and the public.
Tesla says that neither system can currently drive autonomously and that human drivers must be ready to take control at any time.
“Full Self-Driving” is being tested on public roads by select Tesla owners. The company recently called it FSD Supervised.
Musk said last week that he didn’t think regulatory approval would be a limiting factor in robotaxis deployment. “If you have billions of miles that show that in the future, unaccompanied FSD is safer than humans, what regulator could really stand in the way of that?” he asked.
However, Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who researches the safety of self-driving cars, does not expect Tesla to deploy robotaxis without human drivers on almost all roads in the next decade.
The safety record Musk cites is based on the fact that a human driver supervises the automated system, he said. “Unless you have data that shows that the driver never needs to supervise the automation, there’s no basis to say that they’re going to be acceptably safe,” he said.
Musk has said that Tesla is a dedicated robotaxi vehicle during an event on October 10. The event was postponed from August 8 to accommodate changes Musk wanted to the vehicle.
Musk has told investors that Tesla is less of a car company and more of a robotics and artificial intelligence company. Many investors have put money into the company based on the long-term prospects for robotics technology.
Musk has touted self-driving cars as a growth catalyst for Tesla since hardware for “fully self-driving cars” hit the market in late 2015.
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Associated Press editor Lisa Baumann contributed to this report from Bellingham, Washington.