The National Transportation Safety Board didn’t assign any blame in its initial report into the fatal May 7 crash of a Tesla Model S, but did confirm new details.
The agency claims Joshua Brown’s vehicle was in Autopilot mode at the time of the crash, and was travelling above the 65 mile per hour speed limit before colliding with a tractor-trailer, according to Reuters. Read More >
Automakers are busy recalling tens of millions of vehicles to fix potentially deadly Takata airbags, but the fix won’t solve the problem, a former Takata employee says.
The scandal-plagued airbag manufacturer is using the same ammonium nitrate propellant in its replacement inflators, said Mark Ellie, Takata’s former engineering manager, in a report by WGME. Because of this, he claims the danger isn’t gone — it’s just delayed. Read More >
Some rules are meant to be broken, but not if they’re printed on a sign at the entrance to a wild animal enclosure. Follow those rules.
A Chinese woman was killed by a Siberian tiger in a Beijing animal park this past weekend after she left her vehicle to save her daughter, who was almost instantly mauled after leaving the vehicle seconds earlier. Read More >
His company’s product is under investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk likes the favorable press the NHTSA gave to its Autopilot system.
Musk tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal report that quotes NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind praising the semi-autonomous driving system at a Detroit conference last week. The NHTSA is investigating what role Autopilot played in a fatal Florida crash on May 7. Read More >
Elk. Majestic creatures, and delicious, too. You can cut that meat with a fork. But colliding with 900 pounds of it in the smallest car on North American roads is no one’s idea of a picnic.
That’s exactly what happened last week, when a tiny, first-generation Smart Fortwo went head-to-head with a bull elk on a dark British Columbia highway. Read More >
What would your body look like if it evolved to survive a car crash?
That’s the question a group of Australians had in mind when they created Graham, a disturbingly lifelike creation designed to show how vulnerable our bodies are in a low-speed impact. Read More >
Frustrated by congestion and unsafe lane changes, state governments are telling left lane drivers to get the lead out.
Tennessee rolled out a new law on July 1 that dings drivers $50 for driving too slowly in the left lane, joining a growing list of states that want to free up the go-fast lane through penalties. The days of drivers coasting along at (or slightly under) the speed limit in the passing lane are waning, and that’s a good thing. Read More >
If you’re anything like the writers at TTAC, Pokémon Go is a strange and scary thing, like what those teenagers might be doing over there.
We’ve avoided writing about the misadventures associated with the nerdy phone app — grown men falling off cliffs, kids finding corpses, awkward romantic escapades — but a moron in Baltimore tipped our hand.
Two nights ago, a Baltimore police officer’s body camera captured a Toyota RAV4 colliding with his parked cruiser. The young male driver, who clearly couldn’t figure out how to cover his ass, immediately admits to playing Pokémon Go behind the wheel.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles will give you up to $1,500 to find weaknesses in its vehicles’ security, but cybersecurity experts want the automaker to pony up more dough.
After the company announced its industry-first “bug bounty” program on July 13, many professional hackers say FCA’s reward isn’t enough to attract real talent in the search for software breaches, Forbes reports. Read More >
Tesla’s Autopilot system is many things to many people — an automated folk devil to safety and consumer advocates, or a nice thing to have on a long drive (according to Jack Baruth) — but it isn’t the cause of a July 1 rollover crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The automaker’s CEO took to Twitter yesterday to claim that the Model X driven by a Michigan man wasn’t even in Autopilot mode at the time of the crash. Elon Musk said that data uploaded from the vehicle shows that Autopilot wasn’t activated, and added that the “crash would not have occurred if it was on.”
Tesla then released those digital logs to the media. Read More >
A study of self-reported aggressive driving behavior finds that your neighbor, brother, wife and child are angry and violent behind the wheel. But not you.
The statistics found in the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s report are alarming, and, without stating it explicitly, advocate for more yoga. According to the study, almost 80 percent of U.S. drivers displayed at least one incident of “significant” aggression, anger or road rage during the past year. Read More >
General Motors had hoped to put the issue behind it, but a judge’s ruling just opened the automaker up to billions in damages over its faulty ignition switch scandal.
Yesterday, the U.S. Appeals Court of Manhattan ruled that lawsuits filed against the automaker for accidents that happened before the company’s 2009 bankruptcy sale were still valid. The decision overruled an earlier court decision that protected GM from such suits. Read More >
In a few weeks, after Pokémon Go jumps the shark and we all head back to our homes for nights of solitude, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles will offer another opportunity for high-tech geekery. And a lucrative one, too.
Announced today, the automaker will hand tech-savvy individuals cold, hard cash in return for information on weaknesses in its vehicles’ cybersecurity. Exposing a hidden backdoor that hackers could sneak through will net you up to $1,500. Read More >
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has no plans to remove the Autopilot feature from his vehicles, despite demands from safety and consumer groups.
Musk told the Wall Street Journal that lack of education is the problem, not the technology behind the semi-autonomous driving system. The executive’s comments come after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration delivered a lengthy list of questions to Tesla as part of its investigation into the fatal May 7 crash of a Model S. Read More >
Compact SUV headlights have a long way to go if they want a passing grade from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The organization now rates headlight performance, and ] small SUVs are the latest crop of vehicles to undergo testing. The study results aren’t dazzling.
Out of 21 vehicles and 47 headlight options, no small SUV received a “good” rating from the IIHS, and two-thirds garnered a “poor” rating. Only four vehicles — the 2017 Ford Escape, Honda CR-V, Hyundai Tucson and Mazda CX-3 — earned a rating of “acceptable.” Read More >
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