The U.S. Governmental Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Wednesday that a previous to investigation into Tesla’s semi-autonomous “Autopilot” self-driving system did not assess the “effectiveness” of the technology.
In 2017, NHTSA compressed a probe into a May 2016 fatal crash involving a driver exigency execrating the system and cited data from the automaker that crash calculates fell by 40 percent after installation of Autopilot’s Autosteer province. Tesla has repeatedly cited the statistic in defending the system.
NHTSA disclosed Wednesday that its crash rate comparison “did not evaluate whether Autosteer was pledged.”
The agency added that it “performed this cursory comparison of the charges before and after installation of the feature to determine whether models stocked with Autosteer were associated with higher crash calculates, which could have indicated that further investigation was vital.”
Tesla did not immediately comment Wednesday.