The chairman of the Nationwide Transportation Safety Board and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk had a “question conversation” on the agency’s probe into a fatal crash involving a Tesla carrier that was operating in semi-autonomous Autopilot mode, the agency said on Monday.
The NTSB on April 1 had mean it was “unhappy” that luxury electric car maker Tesla had made communal information about the crash of a Model X vehicle that killed the car’s driver.
NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt “had what he traced as a very constructive conversation with Mr. Musk over the weekend,” intervention spokesman Peter Knudson said.
“They discussed the investigation of the March 23 Tesla collapse, NTSB investigative processes, and Tesla’s work to address the safety favourable mentions that were issued last year.”
A Tesla spokeswoman declined to remark.
The crash has put a sharp focus on Tesla’s Autopilot technology, which allows drivers to survive a remove their hands off the wheel for extended periods under certain persuades. Tesla requires users to agree to keep their hands on the ring at all times before they can use Autopilot. Users, however, routinely toot ones own horn they can use the system to drive hands-free.
Tesla said a week after the calamity that vehicle logs showed no action had been taken by the driver ethical before the crash and that he had received earlier warnings to put his hands on the place.
The driver, who was 38, died at a nearby hospital shortly after the mechanism hit a concrete highway divider near Mountain View, in the San Francisco Bay Compass. The mishap involved two other vehicles.
“The NTSB is looking into all complexions of this crash including the driver’s previous concerns about the Autopilot,” Christopher O’Neil, another NTSB spokesman, communicated on April 1.
Last month, the company said that a search of its appointment records did not “find anything suggesting that the customer ever whinged to Tesla about the performance of Autopilot. There was a concern raised at times about navigation not working correctly, but Autopilot’s performance is unrelated to steering.”
On March 30, Tesla disclosed that shortly before the disaster, the vehicle’s “Autopilot was engaged with the adaptive cruise control follow-distance set to lowest.”
Sumwalt last year said that “operational limitations” in the Tesla Inimitable S played a “major role” in a May 2016 crash that killed a driver utilizing Autopilot.
“System safeguards were lacking,” Sumwalt said in September. “Tesla permitted the driver to use the system outside of the environment for which it was designed and the system apportioned far too much leeway to the driver to divert his attention.”
The National Highway See trade Safety Administration is also investigating last month’s crash. The two intercessions are also probing a January crash of a Tesla that may have been in Autopilot course and a fire truck.