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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is fighting back against the speculation that a fatal Tesla crash would have occurred in the Houston area on Saturday while Tesla’s Autopilot Driver Assistance software was running.
“Data logs that have been recovered so far show that Autopilot is not activated,” Musk tweeted Monday afternoon.
The vehicle was counted in total, so it is not clear if the accident data of the vehicle survived. But Tesla vehicles are equipped with cellular connections, and the Model S may have sent key data wirelessly to Tesla’s servers in the seconds after the crash.
In the same tweet, Musk also said that the owner of the vehicle “did not buy FSD.” It is an abbreviation for ‘full self-management’, a software package that, according to Tesla, can eventually be driven without a driver. However, the current “beta” version of FSD still requires active surveillance.
Musk also added that “standard Autopilot requires lanes to turn on, which this street did not have.”
Some have questioned the allegation. A Tesla owner posted a video showed on Sunday that he could activate Autopilot on a small road without clear track lines. When the car approached a sharp bend, it appeared that it did not turn the wheel or slow down before the driver intervened.
Musk’s tweet was a response to a Tesla defender arguing that Autopilot could not have been active because Autopilot would not work unless there was a driver in the driver’s seat. weight. Local officials said no one was in the driver’s seat during the crash. According to police, one man was in the front passenger seat while the other one was sitting in the back seat.
But Tesla critics also dispute this claim. One September video shows a man turning on Autopilot in a parking lot, and then climbing through a window. He reaches in with a camera tripod and presses the accelerator on the vehicle to make it drive 1 kilometer per hour across the parking lot.
To be clear, none of this is conclusive evidence that Autopilot was active prior to the Texas accident. There may be subtle reasons why it would have been impossible to activate Autopilot in the street where the accident took place. If the owner activated Autopilot from the passenger seat, it is likely that he had to deliberately bypass certain safety features in order to do so. This is a confusing situation where all possible explanations seem pretty unlikely.
Musk’s tweet got the attention of local officials investigating the crash.
“If he tweeted it out, and he had already pulled the data, he did not tell us,” Harris County constable Mark Herman told Reuters on Monday. “We will eagerly await the details.”
The crash is also being investigated by two federal agencies: the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates car, train, plane and other accidents, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sets rules for the automotive industry.