Tesla Motors Under Investigation for Two Separate Autopilot Crashes, One Fatal

Tesla Motors is currently being investigated for two separate crashes that involved its self-driving cars.

The first crash, which occurred on May 7 in central Florida, is theorized to be the first fatality in a self-driving car, according to TechCrunch.

The Tesla customer who died was a man named Joshua Brown, who the company describes as a “friend to Tesla and the broader EV community” in its blog post. Brown, of Canton, Ohio, was allegedly an avid Tesla Autopilot user and filmed many videos of the tech on his YouTube page, according to Forbes magazine.

Tesla said that the Autopilot sensor could not differentiate between the white side of the 18-wheel truck that Brown’s car hit and the brightly-lit sky, so the brakes were not applied. New reports also seem to suggest that Brown was watching a movie on his laptop before the crash, according to Slate.

The car manufacturer admitted that it was under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for the event.

And now, Tesla seems to be under investigation by the NHTSA for a separate car crash that occurred on July 1, according to a tweet by CNBC.

Albert Scaglione and his son-in-law, Tim Yanke, survived Friday’s car crash, which happened just outside of Pittsburgh, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Scaglione allegedly activated the Autopilot feature prior to the crash, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Tesla described the first crash as an anomaly — and the first known death in over 130 million miles of Autopilot-driven cars, according to Forbes.

The car manufacturer said that it disables Autopilot by default, and the system “requires explicit acknowledgement” that it is a new tech in beta testing before it can be enabled, Tesla wrote in a blog post.

But whether the crashes were flukes — or some combination of system and user error — there’s no denying that both incidents have cast a spotlight on the safety and efficiency of self-driving cars.