Self-driving technology won’t be slowed down by ongoing investigations into a fatal crash involving Tesla’s Autopilot, a U.S. regulator says.
Mark Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said at two different speeches this week in San Francisco and Detroit that the push toward autonomous tech is actually a matter of making driving safer — which is in line with what makers of such technology say.
“We lost 35,200 lives on our roads last year,” he reportedly said Friday at a conference in Detroit. “We should be desperate for anything we can find to save people’s lives.” He also repeated something he said earlier this week, at the Automated Vehicle Symposium in San Francisco: “If we wait for perfect, we’ll be waiting for a very, very long time.”
He also said, “I can tell you that no one incident will derail the Department of Transportation and NHTSA from its mission to improve safety on the roads by pursuing new lifesaving technologies.”
In May, a man was killed in a Tesla Model S that was running on Autopilot — the Tesla feature that allows for some automated steering, lane changes and braking — after the car hit a white tractor-trailer making a turn in front of it. The accident is being investigated by both the NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board.
Tesla said the accident was the first fatal one in more than 130 million miles driven using Autopilot, which the electric-car maker said compared favorably with the record of human-driven cars. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has touted autonomous technology as a life-saver, has promised to do more to educate users about the use of Autopilot and has no plans to disable it.
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who delivered a keynote address at the symposium in San Francisco, did urge caution when it comes to self-driving technology, however.
“Sometimes the coolness of the technology may drive people to push the limits beyond what manufacturers have intended,” Foxx said, according to the Car and Driver blog. “We need to think about that even as we build these systems.”
Photo: The inside of a Tesla vehicle is viewed as it sits parked in a new Tesla showroom and service center in Red Hook, Brooklyn on July 5, 2016 in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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